What Homeschooling Tells Us About Government Schools

Don Boudreaux offers this analogy at Hayek

Imagine that the only source of professional haircutting is government-operated hair-care salons that are funded exclusively with tax dollars doled out directly to the bureaucrats in charge of each salon. Imagine also that each citizen can use a salon free of charge, but is assigned exclusively to the salon nearest to his or her home. If this were how professional hair-care specialists were organized and compensated, these specialists’ salaries would be determined not by competition and consumer choice, but by politicians. Hair-stylists’ workloads and incomes would then depend only upon their skills at political lobbying and uttering clever sound bites for the news media. No premium would attach to quality hair-styling skills. Hair stylists inevitably would lose much of their ability to cut and style hair as they focus their energies increasingly on protecting and expanding their special political prerogatives. More and more people would cut and style their own hair at home.

In 1980 only 10,000 children were schooled at home. Today that figure stands at about one million. This means that fully 2 percent of all children are now homeschooled. And this number continues to grow, even though public education is “free.”