2.8 Education

2.8 Education

Education, like any other service, is best provided by the free market, achieving greater quality and efficiency with more diversity of choice. Schools should be managed locally to achieve greater accountability and parental involvement. Recognizing that the education of children is inextricably linked to moral values, we would return authority to parents to determine the education of their children, without interference from government. In particular, parents should have control of and responsibility for all funds expended for their children's education.

By now it should not come as a surprise to anyone following this blog that the Libertarian Party would stand against the economic injustice of the educational system.

Nothing can be more important than children. The preamble of the constitution mentions them as a primary reason for the existence of the union at all. "... to ourselves and our posterity". Thus the responsibility and right to care for, including educate, the next generation falls on the parents.

The government has usurped this right. The state has laid claim to your children. It has said that it has the right to force you to use its educational system in which you have nearly no control, or to pay double to go outside the system. It happens every day that Americans across the country are forced to pay for educational services that do not apply to their own children, and that contain content in which they do not agree in environments that they do not approve.

While it makes some sense to codify the requirement of education, the methods employed are specifically designed to allow the state access to your child's mind. With this truth exposed we must ask ourselves why? Why would the government want access to your child's mind so strongly that it is willing to enact such laws? I do not have the answers and leave it to the reader to draw his own conclusions except that I note history shows that when the government attempts to assert rights it does not have the result is universally negative.

When you couple this with the observable fact of the failure of the public school systems in terms of price for performance it should come as no surprise that the Libertarian Party points out the reality that the free market system can and would do a better job.