Milton Friedman on Educational Vouchers

“The responsibility for educating children is with their parents. And in order to make it a parental matter, you have to have a situation in which the parents a re free to choose the schools their children go to. They aren't now. Today, the schools pick the children. Children are assigned to schools by geography. By where they live. And essentially you've got a school picking its own children. As I said in 1955, take the amount of money that we are now spending on the education, divide it by the number of children, and give that amount of money to each parent.” Excerpts from an interview with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn on May 22, 2006 in which Milton explains the dynamics involved when parents are empowered to select the best educational option for their children. Source: LibertyPen YouTube channel. Translated by Jadranko Brkic.

Transcript:

You've got two areas in United States which suffer from the same disease. Education is one, and healthcare is the other.

Education is a simple case. It isn't a public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education. You are a producer producing a product. And if you want to subsidize the production of that product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize a producer, or you can subsidize a consumer. In education, we subsidize a producer. We subsidize a school. If you subsidize a student instead, you will have competition. The student could choose which school he would go to. And that would force the schools to improve and to meet the tastes of their students.

Here is a situation which we have a educational system in which something like thirty percent of the youngsters who start high-school never finish it. They are condemned to low income jobs. They are condemned to a situation in which they are going to be at the bottom. And that leads to divisive society. It leads to a stratified society rather than one of general cooperation and general understanding.

Literacy today in United States, effective literacy, is almost surely less than a hundred years ago. Before we had any government involved in education at all, you had the majority of youngsters were schooled and were literate, were able to learn. It's a disgrace for a country like United States to have thirty percent of the population never to graduate from high-school. The number is more than that because I've left out those who dropped out through elementary school. It's a disgrace that people can't read and write. It's hard for me to see how we can continue to maintain a decent, free human society if you have a large subsection which is condemned to poverty and to handouts.

Education ought to be a state and local matter, not a federal matter. So it ought to be a local matter, but it ought to be a parental matter. The responsibility for educating children is with their parents. And in order to make it a parental matter, you have to have a situation in which the parents a re free to choose the schools their children go to. They aren't now. Today, the schools pick the children. Children are assigned to schools by geography. By where they live. And essentially you've got a school picking its own children. As I said in 1955, take the amount of money that we are now spending on the education, divide it by the number of children, and give that amount of money to each parent. That's what we are spending now, we keep on spending that, but spend it in a form of vouchers, going to all parents.

Stop the growth of government. Bring government down and make it smaller.