Responding to my recent Corner post on the anti-homeschooling Left, George Mason University professor Don Boudreaux penned an excellent letter to the editor at Cafe Hayek. Quoted below in full:
Nate Hochman eviscerates the left’s case against homeschooling (“‘A Revulsion from Distinctness’,” Dec. 1). No greater indictment of the poor quality of government schooling exists than the move toward homeschooling.
In nearly all facets of our lives, a virtuous cycle plays out: As we become wealthier, we rely more and more upon specialists to perform tasks for us, and as we rely more and more upon specialists, we become wealthier. Compared to just a few decades ago, today we less often prepare our own meals at home and more often dine on meals prepared by restaurants and supermarkets; today we less often change the oil in our own cars and more often go to Jiffy Lube and Pep Boys; today we less often even drive ourselves to restaurants and supermarkets, as we more and more outsource to companies such as DoorDash and Uber Eats the task of delivering our groceries and meals from supermarkets and restaurants to our front doors.
As Adam Smith taught, prosperity grows with greater specialization. Compared to non-specialists, specialists perform their tasks more reliably and faster. But if specialists are to develop and use skills that are beneficial not only to themselves but also to the public, specialization must be driven by markets – that is, driven by consumers and producers spending their own money.
In the case of government schooling, the specialists who operate this system are shielded from market forces. Government arranges for their ‘customers’ to be captive and for their pay to be disconnected from how well or poorly the children under their charge are educated. Government-school administrators’ prosperity depends not on educating children but on playing politics. As such, the specialized skills acquired and honed by government-schooling administrators have little to do with teaching and almost everything to do with politicking.
The fact that so many Americans, who rely more and more upon specialists in most areas of life, now are turning to homeschooling is strong evidence that the specialized skills of government-school administrators are not ones that make these schools sources of true learning.
I’m glad Professor Boudreaux brought up the rise of technocratic “specialists” — another term for what James Burnham famously described as a new class of “managerial elites.” Julius Krein describes the thesis of Burnham’s seminal 1941 book The Managerial Revolution:
Burnham argued that the West was undergoing an irreversible transformation away from capitalism. It was not socialism that was in the ascendancy, however, but rather a new type of exploitative society that he termed managerialism. In managerial society, according to Burnham, a technocratic elite of credentialed managers, exercising power through enlarged corporate and government bureaucracies, would occupy the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and culture. Private property would not disappear, but the state nonetheless would exercise a dominant role in the economy, and social and political arrangements would be radically altered. The managerial economy would be categorically distinct from previous forms of entrepreneurial capitalism, and the managerial regime would not be democratic or classically liberal in its essential characteristics.
Movement conservatism, formed as it was by its opposition to global communism, often resists thinking of politics in class-based terms (but not always: William F. Buckley once said that he “would consider [James Burnham] the No. 1 intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding”). This is understandable insofar as Marxist analysis, in its most dogmatic form, is deterministic and essentialist on the question of class, holding that all human relationships, social arrangements, and historical developments can be reduced to class and class alone. But particularly in our contemporary moment, American politics and culture are incoherent without some recognition of the reality that we do, in fact, have a distinct “ruling class” (as do all societies everywhere, in some way, shape or form), and it is largely composed of a trans-institutional bureaucracy of managers. These form a set of technocrats — inhabiting elite institutions throughout the culture, from corporate human-resources departments and academia to the federal government itself — who have taken it upon themselves to plan and “administer” the social, cultural, and economic functions of modern society.
I touched on this point yesterday in my column on the hysterical “misinformation” panic over Elon Musk’s Twitter reforms:
The “war on misinformation,” as the title of a June Aspen Institute panel dubbed it, is the latest in a long series of wars — on terror, poverty, crime, drugs, hunger, and so on. All of these crusades, to one degree or another, were preceded by talk of crisis. (When candidate George W. Bush announced his “war on illiteracy” in 2000, for example, he declared that the nation’s reading levels were a “national emergency.”) But the solution is always the same. That most of these wars have failed to achieve their stated goals is beside the point. Their true purpose has always been to award further control to social planners under the auspices of a coordinated “national response.” And in this, they have been victorious.
Whatever term you prefer — social engineers, specialists, managerial elite, etc. — this class, with its burgeoning power over American life, is the source of much of what ails the country today. Cultivating spheres of civil society that exist outside its purview, and that could eventually resist its control, is an important project for conservative reformers. In this sense, it’s a step in the right direction to support and even promote American families who prefer homeschooling to the public-education cartel.