It's easy to forget that right into the 1990s, Sears was viewed as a blue chip retailer. In the year 2000, it’s worth remembering that GE was the world’s most valuable company, Enron the smartest, and AOL the gold standard of the burgeoning internet economy.
So, what does simple U.S. business history have to do with an opinion piece about public versus private schools? The answer is nothing, and everything.
At present, and realistically for decades, American conservatives and libertarians have lamented the state of public schools. Since public school teachers are working for the state, critics say they instruct with a left-wing bias.
The popular allegation about public school teachers implies that private schools, seemingly for being private, are providing young people with a freedom and free-market focused curriculum. It’s not a realistic view as any parent with kids in private schools will attest, and in some cases, lament.
Where it becomes a bit more interesting is that while K-12 public schools are frequently the target of right leaning types who believe “government schools” are the cause of so much that’s wrong with young people today, the critique is to a high degree flipped on the collegiate level. Often it’s the elite private universities that elicit right-wing disgust, private schools in the Ivy League most notably.
Which brings us to the “everything” part of the introduction. It’s yet again said routinely by the right that public schools are the problem with education and young people today, and that part of what makes public schools so allegedly bad beyond the left-wing instruction is the lack of competition for students. It’s an interesting notion, but one belied by the private schools that conservatives have a much higher regard for. Please re-read the opening paragraph to see where this short argument is going.
Seriously, isn’t it odd that private American K-12 schools are so venerated by market loving conservatives and libertarians when it’s those very schools that frequently tie their worth to how long they’ve been around? Considering the perceived best private schools not just K-12, but also universities, the “best” is often an effect of how long they’ve existed, the more decades and centuries in existence, the much more desirable the school.
Of course, measures like this run wholly counter to how businesses are judged by consumers, and much more important, investors. Said more pointedly, if the best, most desirable to work for U.S. businesses were hundreds of years old, the state of the U.S. economy would be disastrous. Not so with education, apparently. American parents go to great lengths and expense to place their kids in the oldest “institutions of higher learning."
Which isn’t a comment from here that U.S. education is “broken,” or in “crisis” as so many nailbiters are prone to say about most everything that happens to bother them. Instead, it’s a comment that the surest sign of how much we overrate education as a factor in anything can be found in the schools we think so highly of, and regardless of whether they’re public or private.
Sorry, but it just doesn’t matter. As most conservatives and libertarians would sheepishly admit, there are lots of “good” K-12 public schools too. Some of their kids attend them. Which is a reminder that what makes schools “good” is caring parents, conscientious kids, and teachers attracted to both. To focus on teacher ideology, or public versus private when it comes to how kids think or what they do in the future, is to miss the point.
