Rethinking Education: How Libertarian Solutions Can Improve Learning and Society
With President Trump’s Administration seeking to shrink or close the department of Education many on both the left and right of politics have been plunged once more into debate on how the state should provide education to the nation. A libertarian approach has the benefit of being able to rise above the arguments of those confined to the traditional political spectrum and propose another path altogether. By reimagining schooling beyond the familiar model of state-funded and state-run institutions libertarian thinkers argue that education can not only survive without the state, but actually flourish – delivering higher quality, greater accessibility, and freedom from both the left and right’s political indoctrinations.
Education Before State Schools
Long before state governments took over schooling, education was provided privately by families, churches, guilds, and private tutors. In medieval Europe, for example, learning was centered in institutions independent of secular authorities. Church-run schools were primary providers: cathedral schools (operated by cathedral clergy) and monastic schools trained not only future priests but also lay students (often boys of the nobility) in literacy and advanced learning. Craft guilds handled vocational education through apprenticeship programs. The first universities, which emerged in the Middle Ages, were guilds of scholars chartered by Church or monarch but self-governing – essentially private associations of teachers and students.
In other parts of the world, too, education was frequently a private or community affair: for instance, traditional Islamic education flourished via madrasas funded by charitable endowments, not central governments, and Chinese literacy was often spread by clan schools or tutors hired by families.
By the early modern period, increased wealth and advancing technology allowed a further expansion of educational institutions to encompass ever more of a societies population. In Britain, prior to compulsory state education in the late 19th century, an extensive network of charity schools and subscription schools existed. Churches played a pivotal role – notably through the Sunday School movement. These schools, run on charitable donations and staffed by volunteers, taught basic literacy using the Bible. Their growth was explosive: around 1800 there were only about 2,000 Sunday schools in England and Wales (reaching perhaps 10% of children), but by 1851 there were 23,000 Sunday schools educating roughly 2.4 million children – about 55% of the child population. In fact, it’s estimated that by the mid-19th century, three-quarters of working-class British children had attended some Sunday school during childhood. Alongside these were weekday schools sponsored by churches (often called “voluntary schools”) and small private schools – from the humble “dame schools” (where a local woman would teach neighborhood kids for a small fee) to more formal academies. All this was achieved with virtually no state involvement.
Early America provides another illuminating example. During the colonial era and the early United States, education was highly decentralized, typically organized at the community or family level. Literacy rates were impressively high. By the time of the American Revolution, an estimated 80% of adult men and 50% of women in New England were literate. In short, America achieved significant basic literacy before the advent of compulsory public schooling.
These historical cases demonstrate that education is not inherently a creation of the state. Literacy and learning were spreading steadily and on an upwards trajectory in many places well before state funded and mandated school attendance.
How The State Took Over Education
If organic education systems were working so well, one might wonder: why did we end up with the state-run education systems we have today? Far from being purely benign or inevitable, the rise of government education in the 19th and 20th centuries was driven by specific ideological and political motives – arguably more about social control than about learning.
As modern nation-states formed, leaders saw universal education as a tool to forge a common national identity and loyal citizens. The clearest early example is Prussia which in the early 19th century pioneered a centralized state schooling system. Children were organized in age-based grades, taught a standardized curriculum, and expected to obey the teacher – a deliberate “factory model” designed to instill discipline.
The Prussian example prompted something of an “education arms race” – other states felt they must invest in public education to stay competitive. By the early 20th century, most countries had instituted tax-funded primary schools at minimum, seeing it as essential for economic progress and military preparedness.
In 19th-century Europe, public schools became a means to propagate the national language, national history myths, and loyalty to the fatherland. For instance, after the French Revolution, France established state primary schools to replace church schools in order to instill Republican ideals and standard French (replacing regional dialects).
In the United States, the mid-19th century “Common School” movement led by Horace Mann was explicitly about uniting a diverse young nation. Education reformers argued that a republic needed a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry to survive. They spoke of schools as a melting pot: Samuel Lewis, one such reformer, said the public schools were meant to take “a diverse population and mold them into one people.” This paternalistic (some would say arrogant) attitude – that government educators know better than parents – was common in the movement for public schools.
One of the earliest uses of compulsory education was overtly to enforce ideological conformity. Initially this took the form of religious conformity under state churches, then as mass schooling secularized in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ideological mission shifted to civic nationalism or political ideology. Totalitarian regimes took this to extremes: Nazi Germany’s curriculum was rife with propaganda about racial pride and Führer-worship; Soviet schools drilled children in communist doctrine and loyalty to the Party. But even in democratic nations, public schools have often been vehicles for soft propaganda – promoting whichever civic narrative or values the government of the day finds desirable. History textbooks, for instance, routinely present patriotic versions of events that downplay national crimes and highlight glories.
It’s not a coincidence that compulsory schooling laws in the U.S. were often championed by groups who wanted to suppress cultural pluralism – for example, the landmark Oregon compulsory schooling law of the 1920s (later struck down) was pushed by nativists and the Ku Klux Klan, aiming to force all immigrant and Catholic children into Anglo-American public schools and shutter parochial schools.
The Problem with State-Run Education
Given the questionable agendas and motives behind the rise of State-funded compulsory education, it should be no surprise that serious problems are consistently found with it in practice.
Government schools, by design, teach a curriculum approved by the state. Inevitably, this curriculum will reflect the perspectives and interests of those in power. Whether it’s overt (as in authoritarian regimes) or subtle, there is a risk that public schooling instills a uniform ideology in students.
Public school systems are also centralized bureaucracies and subject to the inefficiencies of monopoly. With guaranteed funding through taxation and compulsory attendance laws ensuring enrollment, public schools do not face the same pressure to satisfy parents that a business would face to satisfy customers. The outcome can be complacency. International assessments have shown stagnant or declining scores for many public school systems despite ever-increasing funding. In the U.S., functional illiteracy remains surprisingly high even after K-12 schooling for all – by one Department of Education survey, 19% of high school graduates were functionally illiterate (unable to read well enough for everyday tasks). Civics knowledge is dismal: only about 23% of American eighth-graders are proficient in civics and 18% in U.S. history according to national assessments.
None of this is to say that public school teachers and administrators don’t work hard or mean well – many are dedicated heroes doing the best they can. But they operate within a structure that has inherent flaws.
Modern Grassroots Private Education
Given the deficiencies of state run education there are numerous examples of private solutions arising that can shed light on what a more complete private alternative may look like. Indeed, it is in some of the poorest corners of the world, people have organically developed education systems outside of state control – not so much out of ideological choice, but out of necessity when public systems failed or never reached them.
One remarkable trend, documented by researchers like Professor James Tooley, is the rise of low-cost private schools in slums and villages across Africa and Asia. In countries such as India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda, thousands of small private schools have sprung up serving families in poverty. They charge very low fees (a few dollars a month, or even per-day payment plans) and operate in simple facilities – yet parents often prefer them over free government schools. Why? Because they often deliver better results and a safer, more attentive learning environment. For example, in the sprawling urban slums of Lagos (Nigeria) and Nairobi (Kenya), surveys found a majority of children attend informal private schools rather than the nominally “free” public schools (which may be inaccessible, overcrowded, or non-functional).
The performance of such schools has been eye-opening. Research consistently shows that children in low-cost private schools often outperform their peers in government schools on basic reading and math tests, even after controlling for family background.
We can also see plenty of evidence for private solutions in wealthier countries too with the rise of homeschooling networks, “micro-schools,” and learning pods. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when government schools shut down, many parents in the U.S. formed small co-op pods or hired tutors to educate their kids in groups at home. Similarly, the growth of charter schools and private online academies has accelerated, all pointing to an appetite for alternatives to the one-size-fits-all public system. On average, private school and homeschooled students in the U.S. outperform public school students in test scores, graduation rates, and college admissions, despite public schools spending substantially more per student.
A Libertarian Framework for Education
Examples – both historical and modern – serve to dispel the myth that education simply won’t happen without the state. From medieval guilds to 21st-century slums, education has often been successfully managed by private society. These realities provide a blueprint and inspiration for what could be achieved on a broader scale in a fully stateless, decentralized, free-market education system.
To start with, education would be provided by a multitude of independent schools, tutors, and innovative providers operating in a free market. Just as essentials like food, clothing, and housing are provided by private enterprise or charity today, so too would schooling. There wouldn’t be a single “system” but rather a network of options. Some schools might be run as businesses for profit; others could be non-profit cooperatives or community-run. We can envision small neighborhood schools, larger academies, religious schools, Montessori and Waldorf-style schools, vocational training institutes, online learning platforms, apprenticeship programs with businesses, and more – all coexisting. Parents (or students themselves, in the case of adult education) would choose among these offerings based on their needs, preferences, and budget.
Competition would drive schools to maintain quality and affordability. If one school fails to teach effectively or is too expensive, families will have alternatives and the underperforming school must improve or close. This market competition is currently largely missing in state monopolies. As a result, schools would be directly accountable to parents and students.
Apprenticeship and mentorship would also likely rise again for teenagers – not just in manual trades as of old, but in white-collar and high-tech fields too. For instance, a student interested in programming might apprentice at a software firm at 16, splitting time between coding and academic study, rather than sitting in a generic classroom all day. Freed from rigid school-leaving age laws, companies and professionals could create structured apprenticeship programs to train young people, which often can be more engaging and directly useful than abstract classroom learning.
Without a central authority dictating curricula, one might worry about what is taught. But rather than chaos, we would get pluralism and innovation. Different schools could adopt different educational philosophies. Many would likely follow broadly similar curricula in core subjects, simply because those are proven (most schools would teach basic literacy, math, science, etc., as there’s market demand for those skills). However, they could differentiate in how they teach (one school might use project-based learning, another a classical curriculum with Latin and logic, another might emphasize STEM and makerspaces).
Crucially, standards would be set by the community and employers. For example, if colleges or employers expect certain knowledge or diplomas, independent accrediting bodies could emerge to certify that a student has achieved a certain competency (just the U.S. has SAT/ACT tests or AP exams today, which are created by private organizations, not governments). In a free market, industry groups might sponsor certification exams for, say, a high school level STEM proficiency or literary analysis proficiency. Voluntary accreditation agencies could also arise to evaluate and endorse schools (similar to how private accrediting bodies evaluate universities and vocational schools today). None of these would have state enforcement, but they would earn public trust by reputation. If one accreditation is known to be rigorous, schools will seek it to attract parents, and parents will rely on it when choosing schools – a market for quality assurance.
Perhaps the biggest concern is how to ensure every child – not just those with well-off parents – can access education in a stateless model. Several mechanisms would likely address this. First, remember that people are not paying taxes for schools, so they have more of their own money to spend or donate. Those resources can be redirected to education directly. Many families that today “pay twice” (once in taxes for public schools and again in private school tuition or homeschooling costs) would be freed of the tax burden and could better afford private options.
But for truly poor families, charitable and community solutions would step in. Humans have a strong inclination to help children in need – one can imagine a flourishing of scholarship funds, education charities, and philanthropic foundations dedicated to funding schools or tuition for the disadvantaged. We already see this in partial form: charitable organizations like the Children’s Scholarship Fund in the U.S. raise private money to give low-income kids scholarships to private schools; countless organizations build and run free schools in impoverished countries; religious institutions often subsidize education as part of their mission. In a society where the state has withdrawn from education, social responsibility would likely be assumed by civil society – much as it was in earlier eras by churches and benefactors with the added benefit of the greater wealth and superior technology we have access to today.
Additionally, creative financing could help families pay for education. In a free market, if education is seen to increase a child’s future earning potential, lenders or investors might advance the costs in exchange for a fraction of future earnings (a model somewhat like income-share agreements that some vocational programs use today). This is a potential way to make sure talent isn’t wasted due to lack of upfront funds and would reinforce demand for those educating and training venues that best evidence results.
We would likely see more variety in higher education too – more specialized colleges, more corporate-run training institutes (e.g. a tech company might run its own “University” to train software developers and grant credentials, open to anyone who qualifies). Online higher education has already started to disrupt the traditional college model with alternatives that are cheaper and often free (like MOOCs – massive open online courses). Freed of state regulation, these could expand and formalize into credentialed programs. The result could be a higher-ed landscape that is less expensive (since competition would pressure colleges to cut bloated costs and focus on teaching value) and more attuned to actual career skills (since businesses and learners drive demand, rather than government subsidies driving supply as happens with today’s often-inefficient student loan systems).
In essence, the libertarian model simply extends freedom of choice to everyone and removes the state monopoly, trusting that education, like any other human need, can be met by free people cooperating through markets and voluntary institutions. The outcomes would be more choice, flexibility, affordability, better alignment with the needs of the education consumer (parents and consumers). Importantly, the moral and philosophical content of education would be chosen by families and communities, not imposed uniformly by politicians. All told by getting education right, we could expect improved wealth, fulfillment, and happiness across society.