Elaboration on Vouchers

Kyle at Vogue Republic gets what I was trying to do with my post on vouchers the other day, even though he admits to being “lukewarm” on the value of vouchers.  The whole post is fantastic and he takes my arguments to a higher level while adding a bunch of his own good thoughts and contrasting those arguments with the arguments for vouchers propounded by Milton Friedman.  I especially liked this paragraph:

The response to Mark’s point is often met with the criticism that some (/many) will make poor choices for their children or are insufficiently capable of making good choices, if they care at all. To which, I would like to point out that parents also name their children Moon Unit and feed them into an early grave with sugary drinks and fast food.

So we can – and probably should – have a larger discussion about parents, children, and the appropriate level of governmental interference of deference, but we know that obesity related health issues, physical appearance, and, yes, even names have an effect on the types of opportunities available to people throughout their lives so if we trust parents (as guardians) to make literal life and death choices about their children, why won’t we trust them to make less dramatic ones?

Kyle also adds a really important point about the effects of choice, if one that I admit can sometimes be overstated when it is used in other contexts:

I think choice breeds personal investment, which we need in our educational system. “I’m here because I choose to be” is a sentiment more conducive to educational engagement than “I’m here because the law compels me to be.”

Kyle ends by stating in one paragraph what took me about 700 words to express:

I think having educational options will lead to more widespread conversations about the value and goals of education. Currently, I’d say that we all generally agree that education is good and more of a good thing is better which is why we obsess over college attendance and degrees. Yet, we don’t delve any deeper into understanding why education is a good thing, what value it gives us, and whether the trade offs are ones we should be making.

Read the whole thing, because I really can’t top it.