Updated: 1/13/20
Christian Economics: Teacher's Edition
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6).
I have made the biblical case against state-run, tax-funded education in Chapter 42. But what about non-profit education? As I argue here, it is not fundamentally different. It, too, is the product of state coercion.
The fundamental principle of Christian education is this: it must be theocentric. The God of the Bible must be at its center. This means that there can be no covenantal neutrality in education. Every system of education reflects the God who undergirds the program’s concept of truth.
When God educated Adam, He had a plan. He wanted to test Adam’s commitment to God and His word. He wanted Adam to assume that God, not Adam or the serpent, is the source of truth. The serpent sought to undermine this outlook. He asked Adam to decide, as if Adam were God. Who was in charge? Adam and Eve would be if they ate, the serpent said. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Is God’s law absolute? The serpent said no by means of a rhetorical question: “Has God said?” Adam would autonomously impute truth either to God’s word or the serpent’s word. If he imputed truth to the serpent’s word rather than God’s word, and then acted consistently in terms of this word, would he die? Would there be a cutting short of his future? The serpent said no. Here was a covenantal conflict. Here was a clash of educational systems.
Proverbs 22:6 does not say that it is the parents, and only the parents, who have a say in the education of the child. But they do possess the final say. They can lawfully delegate some aspects of education. This is part of the intellectual division of labor. God delegated authority to mankind. Men can do the same.
The issue is this: Who is responsible before God for the education of children? Clearly, parents are. They owe their children support and training. The relationship is mutual and hierarchical.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:1–4).
There is no neutral education. Every educational system is covenantal. It is structured in terms of a worldview. This is rarely self-conscious on the part of classroom teachers below the college level, but the founders of modern education knew exactly what they were doing: substituting an anti-Christian worldview. Every theory of education has religious presuppositions regarding God, man, ethics, causation, and time. Put differently, it has a theory of sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and the future. Every worldview is confessional: “we believe.” The more confessional the worldview, the more consistent it is.
Every system of education must be funded. Funding establishes the voice of authority in the program. He who pays the piper calls the tune. In a free market transaction, the source of authority is clear: the buyer is in charge. He buys the program he prefers. He acts representatively on behalf of his children, legally and economically. This is why point two of the biblical covenant is crucial for understanding how education works: authority/representation.
The covenantal problem is the parents’ surrender of financing. They look for someone else to pay for the schools. Someone who provides the money then substitutes his authority for the parents’ authority. There are no free lunches in life. When it comes to money, there is always an agenda. Question: How best to discover this agenda? First, follow the money. Second, follow the confession of faith of the one who supplies the money. In education, this two-part exercise will reveal the agendas—usually hidden—of those who fund education for other people’s children.
There are three parts in all verbal communication: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. There is a linguistic structure. There is logic: the structure of the argument. There is rhetoric: persuasion. In education, we think of this three-part structure as pedagogy, content, and symbols. There is a theory of how students learn. There is a presentation of the facts and logic of a field of study. Then there is persuasion: emotional language and symbols. Parents may not be aware of this three-part theory of education, but all three exist in every educational program or system. But most parents are not self-conscious about these matters. They rarely recognize how these three features work to convey a specific view of the world. The presuppositions of all three are rarely presented to the public by teachers, let alone administrators.
God assigns to parents the responsibility of educating their children. They must pay to educate their children by means of time invested or money invested or both. Most parents do not want this responsibility. It is burdensome. It need not be expensive in terms of money, but for families in which the mother earns a salary outside the home, the cost of quitting her job and teaching her children is high. Some Christian parents do not want to pay this expense. They want to find someone else to educate their children, beginning with funding.
Classroom-based education is expensive. Internet-based education is cheap. In the case of the Khan Academy, it is free. YouTube delivers free video lessons. Any organized religious movement or church denomination could produce a complete curriculum, kindergarten through graduate school, in a year. All it would take is money and commitment. I put such a program together in four years with the Ron Paul Curriculum. It offers a 12-year program with 47 courses. By sharing course payments, which are quite low, with course creators, the RPC gained the curriculum. This is a functional model.
Retired teachers with vision could do it with donated time. The key is vision, not money. There is not much vision in 2017. A million dollars could buy a complete curriculum, K-12, in a year, by paying teachers about $20,000 for 47 courses with 180 lessons each to match the typical public school’s academic year. Denominations could easily afford to do this. They refuse. They are simply not committed to Christian education. They accept the humanists’ convenient myth of neutrality. (These denominations could train seminary students free, too, using apprenticeship with pastors, plus online videos and readings. They are not interested. They prefer that their young men take on $50,000 of needless debt at ages 22–25. This keeps their educationally peripheral seminary professors employed.)
Non-profit education is education in which there are no individual owners of the delivery system. There is no way for salaried officials to pass an economic inheritance to heirs. Parents who pay the schools’ tuition are not in charge of the curriculum. Salaried bureaucrats with no ownership claims are in charge. This transfers economic authority to the bureaucrats for as long as parents and donors do not exert much authority.
The donors usually ignore both the content and techniques of classroom education. So do the parents. Both groups meekly defer to the guild-policed educational establishment. The system seems to be privately controlled, but it is not. It rests on state power: coercion. It is privately funded, but not privately defined and policed.
The school accreditation system favors control by bureaucrats. This accreditation system rests on the power of the state to control both the content and the pedagogy of private education. It removes authority from parents and places it in the hands of educational bureaucrats who must please state officials and donors. Guild-certified classroom teachers and administrators are the people with the greatest incentive to devise the academic rules that keep competitors from getting the legal right to compete against them. They have been certified by state-certified educational institutions. The state prohibits non-accredited institutions from granting certification to teachers. This reduces the supply of teachers. It therefore keeps wage costs high. These beneficiaries of the accrediting system pay close attention to the criteria of certification. Donors and parents do not. Their interest is not focused. The beneficiaries of state regulation are highly focused. This is true of members in every state-licensed guild.
At the beginning of any Christian educational institution is the desire of its employees to spread a particular message: a unique interpretation of the world. But in the field of education, this purpose from the beginning is compromised by the Christians’ acceptance of the humanists’ philosophical premise of the possibility and desirability of neutrality in education, especially neutrality toward the God of the Bible. In this sense, Christian education has always been intellectually schizophrenic, going back to the early church’s apologists in the second century A.D. R. J. Rushdoony’s third book was titled Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961). It was subtitled: Culture, Crisis and Education. It was the first book of his that I read, in 1962. The book was an extension of the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til, who more than any previous Christian philosopher denied the possibility of intellectual neutrality. Rushdoony had a master’s degree in education from the University of California, Berkeley. His detailed book, The Messianic Character of American Education, was published in 1963. It showed how American state-run education has been deeply religious and deeply anti-Christian.
My own work in economics defends Van Til’s perspective. I deny the possibility of value-free economic theory. This presupposition is the epistemological foundation of this book. In the 1963–64 academic year, I took apologetics (Christian philosophy) from Van Til. I wrote a paper for him on libertarian economist Murray Rothbard’s epistemology.
The mission of professional educators is to transform the world in terms of a consistent worldview. The leading humanists in education are far more consistent in this regard than the Christians are. They seek to construct a humanist civilization through compulsory state education. In contrast, the vast majority of Christians seek peace and quiet as second-class participants in a supposedly neutral social and political order. They have no vision of victory regarding history. Their purpose is a permanent stalemate until Jesus comes to rescue them, either in final judgment (amillennialism) or else just before He sets up an earthly international bureaucracy in which Christians at last gain power for a thousand years (premillennialism). I explore this theme in my book, Millennialism and Social Theory (1990).
The first point of the biblical covenant in economic theory is God’s absolute ownership. He delegates ownership to representatives: point two of the covenant.
In non-profit education, no one has personal ownership of the assets. Ownership is held by a representative committee: point two of the covenant. The Board of Trustees officially acts on behalf of God (upward), donors (upward), the community (outward), and students, parents, and the faculty (downward). In fact, because the board is usually composed of non-specialists who are not in academia, the faculty gains control of the college operationally. In most colleges, the doctrine of academic freedom protects professors from donors and the Board of Trustees. Professors answer only to senior professors in their department. After they are granted tenure, they answer to nobody. This doctrine was first developed in Prussia in the early nineteenth century to defend professors at the University of Berlin who were on the government’s payroll, but who resented any interference by the politicians who paid their salaries. The founder of the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was the source of this doctrine. It is now widely accepted because it is in the self-interest of professors to teach it. This doctrine is a way for them to gain career independence from those citizens whose tax money pays their salaries.
The idea of academic freedom has taken root in private colleges. The faculty resents control by the board members. Why? Because the board members are not academics. Also, they act on behalf of the many special-interest groups that claim to have a stake in higher education because they pay for part of the program: donors, parents, and even students. The board does not in fact represent these groups. This universal defection by boards has led to the functional ownership of higher education by the faculties, who legally have no ownership claims. The economics of this dysfunctional system was first discussed in 1971 by legal theorist and educational innovator, Henry Manne [MANee], who later was the founder of the law and economics graduate program at George Mason University in Virginia. He argued that parents who pay tuition, books, and room and board would be far better served if the schools were made profit-seeking, and the assets were turned over to the faculty in a corporate structure. This would further academic competition. Manne also argued that university faculty members are generally hostile to the free market. This reflects the non-profit structure that supports them, which does not hold them legally or economically accountable. (Manne, “The Political Economy of Modern Universities,” 1971)
Manne described a system of bureaucratic management, not profit management. It is not innovative. It resists change. It does not respond to offers of money if those who are offering money demand educational changes.
The less that parents judge the educational programs in terms of the programs’ covenantal content, the greater the authority of guild members who control the programs. Also, the more money provided by donors, the less control parents have over content. The parents’ surrender of control is encapsulated the phrase: “Is your college accredited?” They demand accreditation, which is ultimately enforced by the state.
Every system of education operates in terms of ethics: right vs. wrong. It also operates in terms of efficiency: effective vs. ineffective. In non-profit education, the market does not define efficiency. The ability to raise donated money does. So does the ability to get government grants.
There are multiple issues in all formal education. One is the issue of the proper techniques of teaching: pedagogy. In institutional affairs, these standards are always officially numerical: so much student time spent in classrooms, so many books in a school library, and evidence of the teachers’ formal qualifications. These are all issues of academic accreditation. Officially, the content of education is not supposed to be used to disqualify a program. This is because of the theory of neutral education. Education quality is supposedly judged in terms of neutral techniques, not ethical content.
Second, there is worldview. Worldview always plays a role in which schools get accredited. Formal academic accreditation is the means by which humanists control non-profit private education. This aspect of screening is always concealed by the accrediting agency. I had a friend who was a librarian at an obscure but expensive Protestant college that raises money from naive conservative donors and even more naive parents who spend over $150,000 for a bachelor’s degree that is available for $15,000 by distance learning. A political liberal on the faculty spotted a book on the library’s shelves written by a controversial historian. She ordered the librarian to remove it. There was nothing wrong with the book, she admitted, but the author was notorious. The very presence of the book in the library might lead to the college’s loss of accreditation, she insisted. The college’s president ordered the book removed. The librarian resigned in protest. That was the moral thing to do. But the school got away with it. Parents and donors never heard about this. Most of them would not have cared.
A major tool of control over education is the humanists’ control over the degree-granting institutions. They screen the people who are granted higher degrees, above all the Ph.D. This degree was invented in Prussia in the early nineteenth century. Beginning with Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s, control over the issuing of the Ph.D. became the supreme tool of the humanists in replacing Christians, especially retired ministers, on the faculties of what was then a mostly privately funded higher education system in the United States. One of the first recipients of a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins was Woodrow Wilson, who later used the Ph.D. requirement to secularize Princeton University’s faculty when he was president from 1903 to 1910. He was elected President of the United States in 1912. He was re-elected in 1916. He was the only Ph.D. ever to be elected President. He ran the country in World War I with the same arrogance with which he ran Princeton.
The economic value of education is imputed by employers. They bid against each other for graduates of various schools and programs. To the extent that the academic guild can limit the production of degree-holding graduates, it can raise the wages of graduates. But at the same time, guild members must justify their own high salaries and benefits. They must continue to produce lots of graduates. Tax-funded universities produce such graduates in abundance. Wages cease to rise as rapidly due to increased supplies of graduates.
Parents decide whether to send their children to private high schools based on such factors as tuition costs, the physical surroundings, and the ability of graduates to get jobs or be accepted at prestigious colleges. Parents look at the future wage potential of a school’s graduates. They ignore the fact that they can enroll their children in far less expensive private collegiate programs that cost 10% of the costs of private, classroom-based education. They are not buying a good education for their children. They are buying hoped-for certification, which will lead to higher wages because of the limited number of degree holders. This has been the primary motivation of parents throughout the history of formal education.
Parents impute economic value to higher education in terms of the hoped-for wages of graduates. They care little or nothing about the content of the curriculum. They do not spend time in the college bookstore looking at what books are being assigned to students. They do not feel qualified to make academic judgments. They surrender authority to the faculty. The Board of Trustees does the same. The result has been the capture of higher education by humanist guild members who control the granting of the Ph.D. degree. The content and structure of non-profit private education is therefore identical to the content and structure of tax-financed education.
The structure and content of accredited formal education is the central inheritance of the modern world. Formal education is dominant over all rival sources of worldviews.
The content of education changes slowly, but the structure of higher education has not changed significantly in the West since the eleventh century: lectures in a classroom. The structure of formal education below college has not changed in the West since the early seventeenth century.
Western culture is the outworking of market forces and formal education. As bureaucratization has increased along with greater expenditures by civil governments, the economic returns to formal certification have increased. This process accelerated in the late nineteenth century with the development of the civil service, which legally protects government job holders from political replacement after an election. Access to these jobs is by formal examination. This increases the economic returns to formal education.
The covenantal content of formal education becomes the confession of faith for leaders in the modern world. The content and structure of formal education are independent of the sources of the funding. This seems to negate what economic theory teaches regarding funding and hierarchy. This observation is in fact fully consistent with the bureaucratization of social life. The economics and therefore the structure of formal education are the same in private education as in tax-funded education because of state certification, funding, and licensing of professions. The educational system reflects these state-imposed standards. Parents purchase educational services in terms of their outcome: formal certification, not ethical content. This reflects the triumph of the central confession of faith of the educational establishment: the myth of neutrality.
The content and structure of privately funded formal education does not differ in any fundamental way from tax-funded education. This is because the parents’ desired outcome of formal education is formal certification for employment reasons in a state-regulated job market. This is a strictly economic result. The minority of children who pass through the educational system and receive certification do gain economic benefits. These benefits are created by the state: the restriction of the supply of labor by licensing and certification. The professional guilds retain control, and above all, the educational guild.
Privately funded formal education is protected by law from market competition. The state defines what constitutes a school that is authorized to issue academic degrees. This is the state’s way to restrict the supply of eligible workers. This provides these certified workers with above-market income. The state thereby gains control over professions that are regulated by the state.
The tendency over time is for the professional guilds to gain control over the regulatory system. Employees in the regulatory agencies can retire and become well-paid, influential lobbyists in the regulated professions. They maintain personal connections to people still employed by the agencies. These government employees then become advocates of the agendas of the regulated groups. This way, they also will have high-paying careers later in life when they retire from the government and receive above-market pension income, plus salaries paid for by the guilds regulated by the agencies.
The educational establishment gains its influence though the state’s regulation of the economy. A profession is regulated by the state, but over time its representatives gain control over the standards imposed by the state and enforced by the state. Formal education is not a market-generated service.
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