Let Education Be Free: What the Market Can Do

When Politicians Fumbled, the Market Was Delivering

Even as policymakers demonized private education and tried to strangle it with absurd statist regulations such as a “ban on classes after 10 p.m.,” Korea’s private education sector kept evolving and proving the possibilities of the free market. Consider only Hyun Woojin, a math instructor at the private education company Megastudy. This one young instructor, who continues to shatter annual sales records worth hundreds of billions of won year after year, is in effect replacing thousands of public-school math teachers. The math textbooks he has written, such as Neuron and Subungam, likewise replace tens of thousands of math textbooks. Hyun Woojin’s lectures are not a privilege enjoyed only by a small number of students, but an educational service that students across the country can purchase affordably through online classes.

No matter how noble the excuse, public education cannot hide its staggering inefficiency when faced with the impact of a single top math instructor. Of course, in Korea, private education takes the form of living off public education. That is, so long as there is a state-approved curriculum and a predetermined method of evaluation, the content of private education cannot be separated from them. In other words, as long as state-controlled education sits heavily on the education market, the content of private education can only amount to “how to succeed within the public education system.”

Nor should we overlook an independent, non-institutional education market that is neither public education nor private education in a substitutive relationship with it. Consider, for example, how much high-quality educational content is scattered across the internet. If one only has a smartphone in hand, one can freely absorb the wisdom and insight of historical figures who left their mark on intellectual history, from antiquity to the modern era. As Thomas Friedman put it, one can truly feel just how much the market economy has flattened the world.

Answering Clichéd Criticisms of Free-Market Education

The core criticism of free-market education can be summarized, borrowing the poet Kim Yongtaek’s words, as follows: “If education becomes a commodity … high-end education, being a premium good, becomes expensive, while low-quality education becomes cheap junk.” The argument, therefore, is that marketizing education allows only high-income groups to monopolize good education. Some people also sneer, asking critics of public education to describe exactly what education would look like in a world without it. Below is a response to these kinds of criticisms.

(1) Children from high-income families already enjoy expensive educational services

Those who criticize free-market education by saying, “If education is left to the free market, only children from high-income families will receive a good education,” overlook one obvious fact: even under the public education system, high-income households still purchase the best educational services they can afford. (Of course, here “best” means only what is defined as “best” by the evaluation methods of the public education system. For example, under Korea’s public education system, the best educational service for a college applicant is whatever product can help the student get a perfect score on the CSAT.)

Most children from high-income families attend seven periods of “public education” during the week, go home, and then receive expensive private tutoring or attend prestigious cram schools. Unless one wishes to accomplish the “task” that even former President Chun Doo-hwan failed to achieve—monitoring students 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and fundamentally banning all forms of tutoring—this reality will not change. Therefore, what we should realistically care about is what mechanism can enable ordinary working- and middle-class people to enjoy high-quality education. The answer, of course, is the free market.

(2) Cheap, low-quality education proliferates only under the public education system

Criticisms like Kim Yongtaek’s also overlook the fact that the free market is the mechanism best suited to improving the overall quality of education. Many progressive education theorists have used the cunning and baseless frame that conservatives emphasize “freedom and competition” while progressives emphasize “equality and cooperation,” and have denounced market advocates as inciting students into “limitless competition.”

But the competition actually emphasized in libertarian and market-oriented educational discourse is not competition among students, but competition among providers of educational services. This is the opposite of the reality of Korean education. Public education is staffed by civil servants, who neither compete with one another within the fence guaranteed by the state nor face competition from outside it. And in the private education market outside that fence, distorted competition takes place according to the rules of the “inside.” Just as the labor market has a dual structure, the education market has its own dual structure as well. But if this dual structure were dismantled and a free market in education established, the overall quality of education would rise and prices would fall. Therefore, the “cheap, low-quality education” Kim Yongtaek speaks of exists only in an education monopoly—that is, under a state-controlled education system.

(3) The absence of public education does not mean the disappearance of all government intervention

Finally, the absence of public education does not mean the disappearance of all government intervention in education. As in other industries, the government can intervene appropriately in the education market so long as it does not seriously disrupt market order. For example, the central government or local governments can provide vouchers so that low-income groups can access high-quality educational services. They can establish oversight bodies to ensure transparent school operations or run archives that make it easy for consumers to access information about schools. Crimes such as corruption, embezzlement, and fraud can be handled under existing criminal law. Public schools could even be established, so long as they do not significantly depart from the profit-and-loss principle and are able to compete fairly with other schools.

But to abolish free competition and instead entrust education to abstract, coercive, and uniform state control on the grounds that leaving education to the free market would create various difficulties is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

(4) The free market moves in the direction consumers point to

Some demand that proponents describe exactly what kind of education students would receive if education were left to the free market. But it is meaningless to try to paint a more concrete picture of the education market than what has already been said above. Indeed, education should be left to the market precisely because we cannot predict what innovations will emerge. The market is itself an exploratory process of constantly seeking ways to satisfy the shifting preferences of consumers, and without the existence of the free market, no one can describe one by one what educational innovations will arise or which educational methods will succeed.

Therefore, demanding a detailed description of the educational services that would be provided in a free market reflects nothing more or less than a failure to understand the market process. To give an example, the distribution industry was not entrusted to the market because someone predicted Market Kurly’s logistical innovation of delivering fresh salad ingredients to one’s home by dawn the day after ordering. One thing is clear, however: the free market evolves in the direction consumers point to.

Conclusion

People often say that “education is a hundred-year plan for the nation.” The idea is that education is so important to social development that the state must look far into the future and make plans for it. It is a cliché that appears whenever education policy is discussed. Yet this expression, too, is steeped in the perception that the state should lead education through “planning.” If the state’s “plan,” conceived with a view a hundred years ahead for the sake of social development, is to succeed, then that plan must always be “no plan.”

If asked what form of government intervention does the greatest harm to the development of civilization, I would answer without hesitation: public education. I consider public education even more deadly than the state’s macroeconomic policies or other anti-liberal policies because it concerns the way people think. In this way, public education can endlessly reproduce the claim that public education is indispensable, thereby strengthening the foundation of its own existence. That is why, in the world of public education, rebelling against public education is nearly impossible.

Henry Mencken, the American journalist known as the Sage of Baltimore, assessed public education as follows: “The aim of public education is not enlightenment. Its purpose is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, and to put down dissent and originality.”

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Original title: 교육에 자유를 허하라: 시장이 할 수 있는 일

Author: Beom-su Jo

Date: 2020-05-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=14&idx=22627