Why Should I Pay For Someone Else’s Education?
Co-Editor "The Crisis Papers"
April 5, 2005
Is it unfair to require those who have no children in the public schools to pay school taxes?
The libertarian-right apparently believes that it is. In its 2000 platform, the Libertarian Party proclaimed:
We advocate the complete separation of education and State... We condemn compulsory education laws. We further support
immediate reduction of tax support for schools, and removal of the burden of school taxes from those not responsible for
the education of children.
Furthermore, Christian fundamentalists are disinclined to send their children to public schools, often preferring to
send them to “Christian academies” or to teach them at home. They opt out of public education in order to protect their
children from “corruption” through such secular ideas such as evolution, historical geology, or even tolerance of
contrary religious beliefs. If they choose to withdraw their children from the public schools, why should the
fundamentalists be required to pay school taxes?
Without a doubt, if, as the libertarians propose, “the burden of school taxes” is confined to those “responsible for the
education of children” (presumably their own children), the quality of public education will be severely degraded,
while, at the same time the burden of school costs on families with school-age children will be greatly increased – so
much so, that poor families will be hard-pressed to support the schooling of their children through High School, and
middle-class families will find it difficult to afford college education for their children. In short, without
broad-based financial support for public education, the education-level of our next generation will decline
precipitously.
So if asked why I should pay for the education of other peoples’ children, I have a simple and straightforward answer:
“Because I prefer to live in the company of educated neighbors, and in a country with educated citizens.”
If I were a businessman or an entrepreneur, setting out to establish an innovative and high-tech business enterprise, I
would add: “I pay school taxes so that our country might have an educated work-force, without which my enterprise could
not possibly succeed.”
The nineteenth-century Sociologist, L. T. Hobhouse, put it well when he wrote:
The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to
his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order -- a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the
joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson
Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and
vermin. (Via Paul Samuelson, Newsweek, December 30, 1974)
Thus Ayn Rand’s totally self-made and self directed John Galt type of entrepreneur is a myth. As even Bill Gates must
appreciate, there is no MicroSoft without the myriad of publicly educated “micro-serfs” on the payroll.
Another reason why I should support public education, at all levels from Kindergarten through university graduate
schools, is that this support is “payback” to all those who paid for my own public education. This payback is quite
justly assessed and taxed throughout my lifetime, since the advantages of that public education are with me throughout
my life.
But this is a paradoxical sort of “payback,” since I cannot directly “return the favor” to my patrons. Those individuals
who built and sustained the institutions that I attended, and those teachers whom I encountered in innumerable
classrooms, are either dead or in their dotage. My debt is payable to abstractions: to society and civilization. By this
I mean, payable to those fragile institutions that secure, sustain and enrich the lives of us all: our Constitutional
government, our laws, civic peace and tolerance, our common history, our sciences and arts. I “pay back” those who paid
for my education by preserving those institutions and by enhancing the public good.
“The public good?” The libertarian will have none of it. For, as Ayn Rand once wrote, “; there is no such entity as ‘the tribe‘ or ‘the
public‘; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men.” (“What is Capitalism?”, 1965).
Accordingly, the libertarian argues, educational institutions exist only to benefit each individual person who is
educated, and thus should be paid for only by that individual’s family.
This is an absurdity that only a doctrinaire libertarian could believe. For in fact, the education of each individual
benefits the public at large, and thus should be supported by the public at large.
When I entered the University campuses, first as a student and later as a professor, I found magnificent institutions at
my disposal: buildings and grounds, faculties, libraries, and traditions – all these supported, refined, added-upon over
the decades at great public expense, only a small fraction of which consisted of student tuition and fees. Yet the
returns of this public investment to the public are incalculably lavish: scientific advances issuing from university
laboratories, the accumulation and integration of knowledge from the many separate disciplines, the public service of
the scholars, teachers, engineers, business people, lawyers, doctors, etc. that graduate from these public institutions.
There is no better evidence of the social and economic benefits of public education, than the GI Bill of Rights (1944)
that offered free college education to veterans of World War II. This bill, steadfastly opposed by the Congressional
Republicans at the time, was the foundation of the middle class that emerged from that war, and a springboard to the
unprecedented economic growth that followed. Thus the GI Bill is regarded by many as the most significant federal
legislation of the twentieth century.
Universal support of public education affirms the principle that We the People of the United States are a community, and
not, as the libertarian right would have us believe, a mere aggregate of disconnected, self-interested individuals and
families, the sum of whose private activity is somehow mysteriously, and without need of planning or management,
transformed into the public good. On the contrary, the fabric of our national community has been woven, to a significant
degree, by the public schools as they took in immigrants from numerous nations and transformed them, in a single
generation, into Americans – e pluribus unum. They did so by teaching a common language, our national history, and our
founding political principles. Of late, the teaching of history and civics in the public schools has been downgraded,
and we are now paying a terrible price for this neglect, as a generation of Americans emerges that is ignorant of their
heritage and of their rights, and thus ill prepared and ill-motivated to protect them when threatened.
Public education is now under attack as never before. George Bush promises to “Leave no Child Behind,” and then
withdraws funding from the Act bearing that name. Karl Rove attacks the teachers’ union, The National Education
Association (called by former Education Secretary, Ron Paige, “a terrorist organization”), because of the teachers’
traditional support of the Democratic Party. “Voucher systems” threaten to draw gifted students, and students from
affluent families, out of the public schools, leaving behind the poor and disadvantaged. And so-called “taxpayers’
revolts” are starving the schools of essential funding, often despite the wishes of the public. For example, in my own
community, a majority of voters have recently supported two proposals to increase school funding, only to have those
proposals defeated by a law that requires a two-thirds majority to increase tax assessments. This law, the so-called
Jarvis Initiative of 1979, is believed by many to be the primary cause of the decline of the once-magnificent California
public school system, and the University of California, once the undisputed leader in public higher education.
Because we are all continuing beneficiaries of our system of public education, that system deserves universal support -
whether or not we happen to have children currently in school. Our very freedom depends upon a flourishing educational
establishment, for, as Jefferson correctly observed, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never
was and never will be."
Or as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his Aims of Education:
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move
back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and
there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
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Copyright 2005 by Ernest Partridge
Bio-Tag: Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public
Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" ( www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" ( www.crisispapers.org).