The leveling down argument has discredited the claim that equality of condition has any intrinsic value. Nevertheless, a rigid egalitarianism remains an article of faith among many of our politicians and opinion leaders, and thus continues to serve as a handy excuse for the violation of rights; e.g. “capital should be much more aggressively taxed because…equality.”[1] It also, in the two ways discussed below, rears its ugly head in the sphere of educational policy, and again reveals its intellectual bankruptcy.
First, there is the notion that parents have some sort of civic obligation to send their children to public school. In a recent panel discussion at Georgetown University, President Obama put it this way:
And what’s happened in our economy is that those who are doing better and better — more skilled, more educated, luckier, having greater advantages are withdrawing from sort of the commons — kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks. An anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together. And that, in part, contributes to the fact that there’s less opportunity for our kids, all of our kids (emphasis supplied).
In other words, parents should sacrifice the quality of their children’s education to provide opportunity for others.
Admittedly, this is tangential, but the hypocrisy on display here is breathtaking, since the President is himself the product of private schools and he and the First Lady have elected to enroll their two daughters in Sidwell Friends Academy, one of the most elite exemplars. More substantively, the President clearly has his facts wrong. In addition to the dubious assumption that withdrawing little Sammy from the public school harms little Molly[2], it is not just the wealthy (those “doing better and better”) who are enrolling their kids in private schools and thereby imbibing “an anti-government ideology.”
Apparently, Obama forgot what he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father,
The biggest source of resistance [to educational reform] was rarely talked about though–namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before (p. 388, emphasis supplied).
Like the teachers and administrators he knew from his Chicago days, the parents fleeing the public schools are largely middle class, and simply “know too much” about their local government-run, union dominated school.
However, far more troubling than all of this is Obama’s ethics. Although, he and Michelle are unwilling to do so, he is strongly suggesting that everyone else should sacrifice the interests of their children to promote the greater good. This is just hideous, full stop. The view that parents have special obligations to their children is a fundamental tenet of commonsense morality. Moreover, even die-hard utilitarians should recognize that this special bond likely produces higher functioning, better socialized adults, benefitting the larger community.
Instead of bemoaning the natural instinct parents have to pursue the best educational option for their children, why not make this choice available to all by means of vouchers? This question has no defensible answer, so Obama and others should just drop this idiotic talking point.
This invidious egalitarian fetish also affects the education we provide our gifted children, particularly the highly and profoundly gifted ones (i.e. those who are in the 99+ percentile for general intelligence). The needs of this group are not met by the once-a-day “pull-out” classes and other feeble enhancements offered by the public schools. I invite anyone harboring any doubts about this claim to read the classic book on this subject, Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds, by Jan and Bob Davidson (Simon & Schuster, 2004).
It is instructive to compare our neglect of the gifted with the extra effort that we make for the developmentally disabled (“DD”). Since 1975, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and its predecessor, Congress has required all public schools to provide the DD with a “free appropriate public education.” Satisfying this mandate involves significant additional expense to the district, including administrative costs; the use of specially trained teachers and para-educators; employment of outside evaluators and consultants; and the purchase of various adaptive technologies.
I vehemently object to government-run schools[3], but so long as we are plagued with them, I approve of the special consideration afforded DD students. Every child is entitled to an education reasonably tailored to their needs and aptitudes. But, this same obligation attaches equally to the highly gifted. As things now stand, their K-12 experience involves intense boredom, social isolation and alienation, and the failure to realize even a small fraction of their potential.
It is not clear why we generally neglect our most academically capable kids. The Davidsons note that, “America prides itself on being an egalitarian nation. The highly gifted seem privileged and thus undeserving of help.” Genius Denied, p.15. This seems essentially right to me. We appear to think that the gifted have been blessed with undeserved talents, that they will somehow muddle through, and therefore are entitled to no “special treatment.”
However, this is a morally repugnant stance. If the state is going to coercively collect taxes for the public schools, it is required to accord equal respect and dignity to all students. For the highly gifted, this requires segregating them into separate classes, providing a customized curriculum, and instructors capable of challenging and stimulating them. This will, of course, never happen in state-run schools, which is yet another reason to end this miserable system and start anew.
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[1] “Egalitarianism” is a tough doctrine to get one’s arms around. It is generally premised on the idea that equality is a paramount moral value. However, “equality” itself is hardly a precise concept, since it would apparently include both equality of opportunity as well as equality of outcome. See the entry, “Egalitarianism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I believe that the most illuminating contrast in political philosophy is between those who would sacrifice the interests of the individual for the “greater good,” and those who reject this. See my Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights, pp. 7-8.
[2] Parents who elect private schooling for their offspring must pay twice for this privilege, once through the taxes they continue to pay to fund the public schools and a second time in the form of tuition. The suggestion that the private school choice somehow starves the public schools of funding is utterly preposterous. By international standards we spend lavishly on K-12 education, and in fact spend more per pupil on low income schools than middle class ones. See Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World, p. 130 (and the sources cited there).
[3] I outline my objections to the status quo and the libertarian solution for K-12 education in Chapter 8 of Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World.
