New Possibilities Beyond the Framework of Public Education

The various solutions people propose for Korea’s education problem have one thing in common: they all try, one way or another, to solve the problem within the framework of “public education.” This is not because we actively support the institution of “public education” itself, but because we fail even to recognize the possibility that there may be something outside that framework. That possibility is the free market. The anti-liberal, state-managed education system in which the government supervises and controls every aspect of education must ultimately be abolished.

One may ask why, when discussing education problems, the free market is suddenly being brought up. But for those of us who grew up under the public education system, such a reaction is perhaps only natural. Public education never allows anti-public-education discourse. As a result, even imagining an alternative to public education has become something uncomfortable and unfamiliar to us.

will be published in two parts.

In Part I, I will clarify what public education and free-market education each mean, and critically examine the claim that public education is indispensable. In the following Part II, I will respond to the criticisms commonly raised against free-market education.

State-Managed Education and the Free Market

For a clear discussion, we first need to understand what “public education” is. Public education refers broadly to institutionalized education that is managed and operated under the leadership of the state. “Operated under the leadership” of the state does not mean merely acting as a referee, to borrow an analogy from soccer. It means deciding one by one how many teams there will be, what formations they will use, how they will play, and who will be the strikers and defenders.

For example, in Korea, once a school is established with government approval, everything related to its operation—its budget, personnel, curriculum, and more—immediately falls under the control of a central government ministry. University admissions are likewise standardized under the direct command of the Ministry of Education. Whether it is regular admissions based on the College Scholastic Ability Test, administered once a year over 9 hours, or early admissions based on comprehensive student record screening, all of it falls under central planning and is therefore a form of the public education system. This is, in fact, the core of public education. Universities, too, cannot freely introduce their own evaluation systems, and everything from budgets to staffing remains under the Ministry of Education’s direction.

What, then, does education in the free market as an alternative mean? Simply put, it means that all educational institutions can be freely established and operate as for-profit businesses. But there is one important condition attached: there must be no state-certified and state-enforced education system—in other words, “state-managed education” must be abolished. Without this condition being met, all private educational institutions will inevitably have no choice but to align themselves with the state-managed education system. This is no different from the current shape of Korea’s private education market.

In a free market for education, companies can develop their own curricula, or they can specialize in designing educational programs and purchase standardized educational resources from other firms that produce resources suited to those programs. Teachers and various staff can likewise be supplied by firms specializing in training and managing such personnel. The same goes for evaluation methods. Various companies and nonprofit organizations specializing in designing assessment systems would compete, creating appropriate evaluation systems for each university to select students who are the right fit. In short, in the vast market of education, many firms would divide labor among themselves, improving the quality of educational services while lowering prices.

Right Slogans, Wrong Arguments

Many conservative commentators point to the decline in educational quality and insist that education should not be regarded as a “public good” and that students’ freedom of choice should be emphasized. Yet they do not criticize Korea’s state-managed education system itself. Their slogans may be right, but their argument is wrong. Even when the admissions fraud scandal involving former Minister Cho Kuk’s children erupted, the conservative camp merely poured out demands to expand regular admissions. Even if demanding the expansion of regular admissions is, in the short term, a way of minimizing the contradictions of public education, one must still question whether they have any fundamental awareness of the problems with the public education system itself.

When the issue of history textbooks came to the fore, many conservative commentators even defined biased history education as “market failure” and defended state-issued textbooks, thereby taking a position that only further legitimized public education. But if one intends from the outset to criticize education problems with liberal slogans such as “freedom of choice,” then it would seem logically proper to focus criticism on the essence of the problem: state-managed education.

The Falsehood of the Claim That Public Education Is Indispensable

For most people today, “capitalism,” for whatever reason, instinctively provokes immediate aversion and suspicion. As a result, any suggestion that so-called “capitalist logic” should be introduced into education sounds extremely reckless and illogical. But if one properly understands how the free market works and what functions it serves, this is an utterly common-sense claim.

(1) Because education is essential to national development?

The central argument used to justify public education is that education is so crucial to social development that the state must take the lead in governing it. But consider food, one of the three essential elements of human life—food, clothing, and shelter. Eating three proper meals a day is absolutely indispensable to “social development,” but the government does not direct the food industry. It merely plays an intermediary role by regulating toxic substances and conducting hygiene inspections at the local government level; it does not manage what citizens should eat, how much, where, how, or with whom they should eat in order to eat together properly.

Historically as well, what has effectively provided us with food has not been the government’s central planning, but the free market, in which individuals’ pursuit of profit works in mutual harmony. There is no need to add further explanation about the abundance of food we enjoy. I do not see why some entirely different and extraordinary principle should have to apply to educational services.

(2) Because education is a public good?

Another argument is that because education is a public good, the state must supply it. Here, however, “public good” is being used purely as a political term. Ignoring the academic meaning of “public good” in mainstream economics and merely borrowing the signifier, people make the logically flimsy claim that “because everyone has a right to education, education is therefore a public good.” The reason they insist on using the term “public good” is that, in mainstream economics, “market failure in the supply of public goods” is a traditional rationale for justifying government intervention in the market.

In mainstream economics, a public good is a good or service that, once produced by one economic actor, allows others simultaneously to enjoy the benefits of consuming it. Public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, and because of these characteristics, they cannot be supplied efficiently in the market. The limits of this logic have, of course, been pointed out by Ronald Coase’s “The Lighthouse in Economics” and by the work of many other scholars. But even if one accepts that framework, educational services possess neither non-rivalry nor non-excludability and therefore are not public goods in the economic sense to begin with. Accordingly, there is no economic reason whatsoever why they must be controlled and managed by the state.

(3) Grounds dressed up in vague language

The other grounds advanced to justify the existence of public education are all dressed up in abstract and vague language. Typical examples include claims that it is needed to “cultivate not private individuals but social citizens,” or that the people must be “helped to become democratic citizens oriented toward the common good.” Yet no one can satisfactorily explain how exactly that “private individual” differs from a “social citizen,” nor what the “common good” is, nor what kind of human being a “democratic citizen” is supposed to be. This vagueness merely serves as a pretext for the state to instill officially sanctioned, biased values. This point stands out especially in the way public education deals with late Joseon history and nationalist issues.

And even if cultivating this “social citizen” were to mean purely helping people grow into moral and altruistic human beings, that still would not justify the existence of public education. To present such an objective as the reason for the existence of state-managed education is no different from saying that our virtue and civic consciousness can be cultivated only under the guidance of the state. What leads us to acquire true wisdom for life and moral sensibility is not state-managed education, but our precious experiences of living with the families we love and engaging with various people out in society. It should also be noted that there is no reason the market could not provide this kind of public education as well.

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Original title: 공교육이라는 틀을 넘어선 새로운 가능성

Author: Beom-su Jo

Date: 2020-05-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=14&idx=22625