à chacun son goût

Public Schools and Empirical Tests

jeffmiller:

squashed:

jeffmiller writes:

Every public teacher is paid with tax money collected by the state.  For non-libertarians, this seems ordinary and right.  For libertarians, it’s an obvious, blaring conflict of interest.  If a college professorship in Middle East Studies were endowed by Saudi royals, the conflict would be clear to all, wouldn’t it? Is the conflict significantly different when a Civics teacher at a high school gets paid by the local government? […]

This is actually one we could test empirically. Does a private school education lead to a significantly different understanding of civics than a comparable public school does? Does a private school teacher give a different understanding of the private sphere?  …

But you can’t, really. Yes, you can look at private schools, but how many teachers in the private schools were sent to public ones when they were kids?  How many parents of private school kids went to public schools, and have brought those public school values into their homes?  When this country committed to public schools so many years ago, it set our nation on a course, and this infected (I mean this in a clinical, non-pejorative way) everything that happened after it.  Once the state undertakes to educate its citizens, then the mass of accumulated knowledge and thought that follows is tainted by the inherent bias of this undertaking.  Just how big is the resulting pro-state bias?   Bigger, I suspect, than even the most libertarians suspect; bigger, I suspect, than I can imagine.

I find this whole conversation very peculiar - both f you seem to conclude that public schools should desire to be values neutral. Public schools became ubiquitous because they were viewed as a way to acculturate a diverse society, that is, to impart a shared set of civic values & knowledge. Are we to find this inimical?