Education Costs Nothing Now, So Stop Selling It

Every proposal to fix schooling that I hear falls into one of two camps, and both are wrong in the same way: they accept the building.

The first camp wants more of the same. More teachers, smaller classes, better pay, a newer curriculum. The second camp, the libertarian one, wants the building run like a business: vouchers, competition, parents choosing between schools the way they choose between supermarkets. Both assume that education is a scarce service delivered by an institution to children who are gathered in one place to receive it. That assumption stopped being true some time ago, and nobody has updated the argument.

Who Said It Should Cost Anything?

The libertarian case rests on a premise that is never examined: education is a good with a cost, and goods with costs are best allocated by markets.

Look at the cost. The hard drive on my desk holds more instructional material than the whole of human history managed to produce until quite recently. Lectures by the best explainers alive, textbooks, worked problems, simulations, source code, the complete literature of every field. The marginal cost of giving a child all of it is the electricity to copy it, which is to say zero.

A market is a mechanism for rationing what is scarce. When the thing is not scarce, competition does not make it cheaper or better; it merely inserts a toll booth on a road that could be free. Running schools like businesses is a proposal to price a thing whose natural price is nothing. That is not a reform, it is a business plan.

So the honest starting point is this: every child could learn individually, from a machine, at essentially no cost, and the question is what stands in the way. Not money.

The Socialisation Excuse

The reply is always the same. School is not only about content; it teaches children to be with other children, to sit in a group, to follow a schedule, to accept instruction. Take away the building and you take away socialisation.

I want to look closely at what is actually being praised here, because the word covers two very different things.

There is learning to get along with other people, which children do wherever they are put and did for the entire history of the species before schools existed. And there is learning to sit in rows, raise a hand for permission, move at the bell, and accept that the person at the front is right because of where they are standing. The second is what school is unusually good at, and it is not socialisation. It is training in submission to a hierarchy, and we value it so highly only because our societies are organised as hierarchies and need a steady supply of people who have already been broken in.

Once you see that, the socialisation argument reverses. The thing school teaches that a computer cannot is precisely the thing we should be least eager to teach. Children can meet other children in the afternoon, at the football pitch, in the street, in whatever clubs they choose. They do not need six hours a day of practice at being managed.

What Radical Actually Means Here

I am not proposing better software in the classroom. That is the reform that every school district has already bought, and it changes nothing, because the building and its hierarchy stay in place and the screen is simply bolted onto the front of the room.

Radical means removing the building as the unit of education. Each child follows their own path, at their own pace, through material that is free and effectively infinite. Adults are there, but as tutors who answer questions and as the people who notice when a child is stuck, not as the authority who decides what two thousand children in a district will all be doing at ten o'clock on Tuesday.

The objections write themselves. Some children will not learn without being made to. Some parents cannot supervise. Some subjects need a laboratory or a piano. All true, and all solvable at a fraction of the cost of the present system, because they are exceptions to be handled, not the general case to be designed around. We currently design the whole system around the child who will not learn, and the price is paid by every child who would.

Why It Will Not Happen Soon

The people who run the current system are not stupid and they are not evil. They are the product of the system, they have spent their lives inside it, and they can no more imagine education without schools than a medieval bishop could imagine religion without a church. The state, for its part, likes a building where the whole cohort can be found, counted, and given the same account of the nation's history.

And the libertarian reformers, who present themselves as the radicals, are the most conservative of all: they want to keep the building and change only who collects the fee.

The technology has already removed the reason for the institution. Only the institution has not noticed. That is the normal order of events, and it is why I expect the change to come from children and parents who simply walk away, long before anyone in a ministry approves it.

I have written before about what schools refuse to teach. This is the companion point: the failure is not only in the syllabus. It is in the idea that a syllabus must be delivered in a building, to everyone at once, for a fee.