Market Education: The Unknown History.

• Author: BOND, JAMES E.
• Position: Review

* Market Education: The Unknown History By Andrew J. Coulson New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999. Pp. X, 471. $54.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The title of Andrew J. Coulson's book is misleading. The book is far more than an engaging historical account of "for-profit" education; it is a compelling brief for closing down the public schools and letting the market supply education much as it supplies any other consumer good, from milk to cottages. Education works best, according to Coulson, when parents may choose it and must pay for it, and when schools may set their own curricula and hire their own teachers and must compete for tuition-paying students. The profit motive, it turns out, is the key to high-quality education. That time-honored market motive produces choice and innovation, the absence of which explains most, if not all, the current ills of public education.

Almost everyone involved in the current education debate will find something to criticize in this book. The National Education Association, determined to preserve the job security of its members rather than to promote educational excellence, will detest it. The Department of Education, obsessed with standardizing curricula across the country rather than with encouraging educational experimentation, will scorn it.

The reform crowd, who flit from magnet schools to charter schools to voucher schemes in search of a magic cure for what ails public education, will shake their heads in dismay.

Only libertarians and bewildered parents will listen. The former suspect any tax-supported program as the camel's nose of tyranny; the latter just want their kids to get a good education. Coulson offers for-profit education as the answer to both libertarian fears and parental hopes.

First, he argues that history shows that for-profit education works, and it works better than any other alternative. I occasionally remind my students that Socrates didn't have Power Point; Coulson reminds us that Socrates didn't teach in a city school or draw a salary from the Athens school board, either. Instead, Athenians assumed that young people and their families had the common sense to seek out the education that served their needs and preferences, and persons such as Socrates (and the Sophists) responded to that demand. Sparta acted on a different assumption. It ripped children from their homes and subjected them to a rigid, state-prescribed education in order to mold them into Spartan warriors. Is there any...