Robin Hanson escribe que la función de la escuela pública no es solo o principalmente transmitir conocimientos o señalizar los buenos atributos de los alumnos. También es una herramienta propagandística utilizada para adoctrinar en una serie de valores uniformes, siguiendo el espíritu de sus creadores de imponer una educación común a todos los niños para producir "buenos ciudadanos" y "unir a la sociedad".
La pregunta lógica: ¿por qué un sistema público centralizado y uniforme en lugar de un sistema subsidiado descentralizado y diverso?
Why do we have public schools? Even if we gained from other kids’ schooling, that only suggests we subsidize schools, not that governments run them. Strong local scale economies offer a plausible rationale for government-run municipal services like power, water, sewers, phones, and emergency services. But schooling scale economies are pretty weak.
La respuesta de Hanson: la gente hace una defensa superficial de la libertad de expresión y de pensamiento, y muchos estatistas no defienden imponer los contenidos de las escuelas privadas simplemente porque no quieren ser "tan honestos".
While we give lip service to diversity and freedom of speech and thought, we in practice only allow such thoughts as can survive decades of mind-numbing public-school conformity. Yet we hardly ever discuss what our official school propaganda should be; we almost pretend it doesn’t exist.
For example, professional historians are usually embarrassed by what passes for history in school, but they usually say little. And my guess is that we prefer not to instead subsidize private schools and require them to teach specific things because we’d rather not be that explicit about exactly what propaganda we want taught; we’d rather that happened behind the scenes.
