What's remarkable about his letter isn't so much its contents as its context. As I said, it's author was born in the early sixties--not the early 1960s or the early 1860s, but the early 60s of the first century A.D. His name was Pliny the Younger, and he was a citizen of the Roman Empire.

And Now for Something Completely Different

     Hardly any of our educational woes, it turns out, are new. They have been around as long as government-operated schools have been around, and that, by itself, is an interesting lesson. Much more interesting is the fact that another, very different approach to running schools has also been tried many times in the course of history, and has consistently worked better than the monopolistic state systems that have saddled most industrialized countries for more than a century.
     That consistency is crucial. It would be one thing to point to a single obscure school system from ancient Mesopotamia and claim it as a basis for laying down modern education policy. It is quite another to say that one approach to schooling has consistently proven superior to all others, irrespective of prevailing cultural, technological or economic conditions. And that is precisely the conclusion my study of the history of school governance has led me to reach.
     But what does it mean to assert that one school system is superior to all others? My answer to that question is that it is better at meeting the public's educational goals. I've studied those goals, as reflected in international public opinion surveys and focus groups, and distilled them down to three simple criteria. A good system, according to the public, is one that:

• Satisfies their academic, career, and moral/religious educational needs
• Fosters, or at least does not jeopardize, social harmony
• Provides access to a quality education for low-income families

     Of course things aren't quite this simple in reality. There are many nuances and variations that are lost when people's goals are stated in such a simplified form, but these three criteria nonetheless constitute a common, representative core of the public's most deeply and widely held educational aspirations. The whole basis for choosing these criteria, however, is subject to dispute. They all rest on the view, which I hold, that the direction of a child's education is best left to his or her parents. Not everyone agrees. In fact, a long line of educators have argued just the opposite, that parents are neither sufficiently knowledgeable nor trustworthy to oversee their children's education, and should therefore be replaced in that capacity by experts-usually state-appointed and state-certified experts.
     At its core this is a moral question: Who decides what kind of education is most appropriate for a particular child? What constitutes a good education? Unfortunately, disagreements on moral grounds are frequently unresolvable, but in this case a moral dispute can be easily side-stepped. The critics' argument, after all, is testable on its own terms. Over the last two-and-a-half thousand years, there have been both parent-driven and expert-led school systems, so we can simply have a look at them and see if the unregulated decisions of parents really have been worse than those imposed by state-appointed pedagogues. To wit, I have added a fourth criteria to the three already listed. One school system is better than another if it leads to: more sound, effective, and efficient pedagogical choices. In other words, a school system is good if it teaches children the knowledge and skills they actually need and does so using the most effective pedagogical methods available, and at a reasonable cost.
     Using these four criteria as a yardstick, I have spent the past three years comparing school systems from ancient Greece to twentieth century America, and I have found that one approach has excelled all the rest: a free and competitive educational market. Conversely, government school systems have generally performed badly, with the worst-case scenario being the sort of system most industrialized countries have today: government ownership, funding, and management of schools. It is true that government school systems have been considerably more harmful when operated by totalitarian regimes than by democratic ones, but the public school systems of democratic nations have suffered from many of the same flaws as their autocratic predecessors.
     This is a radical, even heretical conclusion, and it naturally demands an enormous amount of supporting evidence. It isn't possible to present all that evidence in just a few minutes [I'm having quite a time trying to fit it all into a single book], but I can describe a few of the key historical precedents, and try to explain what it is about educational markets that has allowed them to work so well.

Athens

     The first and best example of a competitive market for education was in Athens in the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C. The government played no role in schooling, yet Athenians of that period were more schooled and more literate than any other people would be for the next thousand years. Formal education arose solely in response to public demand, and then grew and evolved to keep pace with changes in that demand. An endless variety of subjects was taught by the wandering professors known as sophists, and people were free to study under any of them or none of them. Formal apprenticeships existed to satisfy the need for career training, and these even appear to have included contractual obligations to ensure that tradesmen were only paid if their apprentices learned some minimum set of skills.
     Poor families could not afford to send their children to school for as many years as wealthier ones, but education and literacy were nonetheless much more widespread among the lower economic classes in Athens than in any other society of the time. Parents with limited incomes worked hard to educate their children, providing them with a combination of academic and practical job training, and many of their children rose to prominence in public life.
     Despite the absence of government regulation, a common core of elementary subjects evolved, upon which a tremendous variety of higher studies were based. Apart from a vigorous competition among teachers, the public's wide ranging educational choices produced little or no friction. It was generally accepted that every student had a right to study what, how, where, with whom, and for how long he or his parents chose. So though Athens was one of the most liberal and diverse societies in antiquity, it was also one of the most cohesive.
     The only contemporary state-run school system aimed at the general populace was to be found just a hundred miles away in Sparta. Spartan public education rejected instruction in academic and career skills, focusing solely on military training. It gave no one any choice, and forbade change of any kind. Based on what parents want today, and what Athenian parents seem to have wanted then, the pedagogical decisions made in the Athenian marketplace were superior to those imposed by Spartan public schooling. It's hard to say what Spartan parents wanted, because no one asked them.

Islam

     The next great period of widespread literacy and economic prosperity took place under the early medieval Muslim empire, between roughly the eighth and the eleventh centuries A.D. Here again, a free educational market arose in response to demand for instruction in reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. Schooling spread throughout the society, raising the Islamic world, during its golden age, to preeminence in culture, science, literacy, and technology.
     Though it was a society grounded in a single religion, it was not intolerant of other religions in its early days, and many non-Muslims lived, worked, and sent their children to school in Arab lands during early medieval times. The atmosphere was so comparatively open and free from conflict, that a modern scholar by the name of Abraham Blinderman has described it in these terms:

Perhaps few other periods in the tragic history of the Jewish people have been as meaningful to them as this period of Judaeo-Arabic communion. The renaissance of Jewish letters and science in Arab lands is a glorious testimonial to the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Arabs at a time when Jews in Europe were being burned as witches, plague-begetters, and ritualistic murderers.

     So, once more, a free educational market not only did not lead to social friction, but actually fostered the harmonious coexistence of very different groups.
     Both secular and religious charities subsidized the education of the poor during this period, acting on the common belief that all children should at least be taught to read and write. Their success is hard to measure precisely, but historians seem to agree that literacy reached a broader segment of the population under the early Muslim empire than anywhere else in the medieval world.
     Eventually, however, the state took over funding of schools, and state control soon followed. Schools became sectarian religious institutions meant to promote one branch of Islam over another, leading to intense rivalries, a decline in science instruction, and a general calcification and circumscription of education. This does not appear to have been what Muslim parents were looking for at the time, and it is certainly not what modern parents want.

England

     As we've seen, large percentages of the population, though perhaps not majorities, were already literate under free educational markets between 10 and 25 centuries ago. Still, it is widely believed that majority literacy is a product of modern state-run schooling. This just isn't so. Both England and America achieved near universal literacy during the 19th century before government schooling was well established in either country. Let's look at the case of England.
     For-profit private schools were the first, and throughout the 18th and most of the 19th centuries the only, to offer instruction in modern languages, mathematics, technology, and practical career skills. The government-subsidized schools run by the major religious societies of the time emphasized religious doctrine rather than academics, gave short shrift to reading instruction, and sometimes ignored writing altogether in the belief that it was not necessary for the children of the lower classes. For these reasons, most poor families sought out and obtained entirely private schooling which did concentrate on academic basics, and which seems to have done a better job of imparting literacy.
     Low income families were very loyal to their children's private schools and teachers. It was only in the mid-to-late eighteen-hundreds, when government subsidies had grown to cover almost all of the costs at subsidized schools, and after competition from private schools had forced the subsidized institutions to update their approach and curriculum, that parents began to abandon the private sector. With the introduction of state-run schools in 1870, most of the remaining private schools were eventually squeezed out of existence. Ironically, the drastic reduction in the size of the private education market virtually extinguished the competitive pressure for government schools to remain responsive to families, particularly low-income families.

Why do Markets Work?

     When taken together, these and numerous other historical precedents point to the superiority of educational markets over state school systems based on the four criteria outlined earlier. But why? I've given that question a lot of thought, and my tentative answer is that there are five principal ingredients to successful systems school governance:

- Parental choice
- Parental responsibility
- Freedom for schools
- Competition among schools
- The profit-motive for schools