Real Education Is Free; Public School is Expensive

Want to learn something? It’s free!
Education is free, except when it’s run by government.

Here are a few expert opinions:
"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control." -- Frank Chodorov, Why Free Schools Are Not Free

“A common reason for the creation of a government school system is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.” -- Marshall Fritz, Founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State

"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists." -- National Education Association, "Education for the '70s," Today's Education, January 1969

Public school is free in only one limited sense: the families who use it do not pay directly for it. In that sense, it is socialized schooling which, in fact, is incredibly expensive and the cost burdens everyone. The trick is that it spends "other people's money."

Instead, I refer to the fact that true education -- learning of all sorts -- is available to all of us without cost, all the time. That has always been so. It means that anyone who charges others for teaching basic skills and knowledge is a fraud, simply because the knowledge is all around us and free for the asking.

Consider how most of us like to share our opinions with others. It’s a sign of how we wish to share our knowledge.

We come to think of public schools as places that offer basic instruction to all children at no cost to their families. How nice, how noble, that schools have been arranged that do not charge for what they offer. Indeed, today we know that they charge the maximum possible amount – far more than needed – and often do not even offer what we expect them to provide.

The public schools are called “Free and Compulsory” and yet who takes responsibility for the results? No one. To whom can a parent complain when his child fails to learn or even be instructed in basic skills? How “free” is that? In the public schools, no one is responsible for any child’s learning – not teachers, not administrators, not the school board, nobody. And if a child fails, they blame the child, not themselves.

MIT has just announced that all of its courses are now available on the internet. Yale has made many of its lecture courses available on tape and those are now distributed at no charge. The largest University in the US (in terms of number of students) is the U of Phoenix. The on line registration is huge, and the cost is relatively low. Go to “College Degrees on Line” and you will find 63 million links with information.

No frills, real degrees, useful info, at your own pace, start any time. Convenient, no hassles. no intrusive questions, cheap.