Who should control the content of school curriculum?
The
question of who should control the content of school curriculum is, according
to my understanding of education, very deep and not answerable in a direct
fashion. Education, like any other service in the economy, is a product (a
joint product to be sure, but a product nonetheless). If we replace “content of
school curriculum” with another product, say an “the features of an
automobile,” the depth of the question becomes a bit more exposed.
Additionally, we have the qualification of “who should,” begging a case for justification beyond “who does.”
Let’s look
at the automobile example. Who does
control the features of the automobile? The engineers who design it? The
executives who give those engineers a mandate for design based on their marker
research? Or is it the consumer who votes with their dollar on what features
they want and at what price? The answer, is all of these, but in the
relationship between the three it is the consumer who has the most power,
because without his money neither the company manager nor the engineer can get
paid.
Imagine that the same arrangement
were like schools. The money would be taken forcefully from the consumer, the
executive would compose a list of demands for what he thinks the consumer ought
to want, and the engineer would attempt to meet these demands within the
confines of a set amount of excised money. At the end of it, the consumer would
be handed the automobile everyone else thinks he ought to have, and if he
dislikes it, his only option would be to purchase a different one at additional
expense, keeping in mind he has already paid for the first car, and also lose
access to the one into which he has paid. If he lacks funds to do so, he cannot
buy another car. Moreover, he is required by law to not only pay for the car,
but to drive it for 13 years.
Democracy is little help in this
situation. If you are truly dissatisfied, the consumer can rally support from
others like him, and after four years hire a new executive with new promises to
change the automobile. He may get more of what he wants, but what about the
minority who loses the election and gets even less of what they want?
Ultimately, this is why products in a free market serve everyone without the
need for political intervention. Everyone gets what car they want, or what
education they want for their children.
So, who should control the school curriculum? Ultimately, families should,
who are in both the best position to determine the needs of their children and
the best position to communicate those needs to administrators (the executives
in the above example) and the teachers (the engineers). They may do this the way consumers control all other products: choice. Now, this is an
opinion; if you do not believe in freedom, and think either the executives or
the engineers should design the product the consumer ought to want, then the
consumers should remain disinvested of power, but I believe in freedom. Freedom
in choice produces a diversity of products, and I think diversity in education
is precisely what is needed, for indeed we have a very diverse country.
This opinion was influenced by the great Milton Friedman,
a nobel-prize winning economist (and also a teacher), who proposed a model of
school choice back in the 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. I’d like to
post a link to his 1980 PBS series, based on a book he wrote with his wife Rose
called Free to Choose. This episode deals with education choice. It’s
worth a watch even if you don’t believe in school choice, as it offers up
debate in the second half of the program.
