To paraphrase John Lennon, imagine there are no public schools, or private ones, too. That is what writer Julie Halpert ostensibly does in a new Atlantic article in which she purports to conduct a “thought experiment,” first imagining a world of all private schools, then one of all public. But rather than coming off as a true, objective experiment, the piece reads more like a dystopian novel depicting the horrors of an imagined all-private system, while comparatively glancing past the many real, actually experienced stains and injustices of public schooling.
It’s not auspicious that the article, before the “experiment” is even proposed, begins with a description of the posh Detroit Country Day School, which likely reinforces the impression that many people seem to have that private schools are snooty preserves of the uber-rich. Halpert notes that the price of Detroit Country Day for high school is about $30,000 per year, but doesn’t mention that the average tuition at a private high school, according to the most recent federal data, is only about $13,000. That average price is high when you’re comparing it to “free” public schools for which you’ve already paid taxes, but not Detroit Country Day high.
With commencement of the experiment we are given a little history…very little. Halpert completely bypasses American educational history prior to Horace Mann’s crusade for common schools starting in the 1830s, noting only that some of our oldest high schools, specifically tony West Nottingham Academy and Phillips Academy, date back to the 18th Century. Halpert also writes that Mann was largely responsible for “the perception of education as a public good.” She ignores the evidence the education was delivered in myriad ways and was very widespread prior to the common schooling crusade—about 90 percent of white adults were literate by 1840—or that it often had a heavily moral character geared at both the private and public good. This is a huge omission, leaving out evidence that largely private provision of education, though sometimes with a modicum of government funding, worked, at least for those who weren’t subjugated by law. Law which was, of course, promulgated by government, the entity that would supply public schools.