Milton Friedman may have been a noble prize-winning economist with an idea he claimed would free education from the governmental dominance.  However, he was not a Christian. When he communicated concerning his proposed voucher system in education, he rested his arguments upon expediency rather than eternal principles set down by the Creator. Therefore, he failed to find the balance that he desired between individual freedom and the need for social cohesion.  The state, even in his schema, was necessary for setting approval standards in education as well as financing it. The following are some select quotes primarily from his essay “The Role of Government in Education” (1955) and an interview a few years before his death in 1995.  He has another work Free to Choose from 1981 which I will address in another post where he goes into greater detail but where government still plays a financing and approval role.  Below are a few bullet point quotes or summaries from his writing with my thoughts following each quote.

• Generally, while acknowledging the role of family in the care of children who are not yet capable of handling the “freedom” endowed to individual, he saw the role of the family as “a procedure [which] rests on expediency rather than principle” (1955).  My Comments: The family was not instituted by God for the care and protection of children and raising up the next generation in the faith but just a matter of expediency since children were not old enough to be responsible members of society.  The very foundation of his worldview is faulty leading to the need for government oversight of the education of children on some level.  His view of family was based on expediency.  Since many of the leftist ideologies of today have come up with models which “free” the child from the need for family, his foundational premises can be called into question by progressives. Arguments from expediency can be easily undone.

• He believed that the government should finance education but not administer that education.  He gave government the role of setting down minimum standards to promote a widespread acceptance of some common set of values required to maintain a stable society (1955).  My comment: Therefore, government ultimately standardizes the enculturation which occurs through education.

• “Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services.” (1955)- My Comment: This means that expenditures must be government approved according to their standards.

• “Parents would be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an “approved” educational institution of their own choice.” (1955)- My Comment: Again, expenditures must be approved by government standards.

• “The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards” (1955)- My Comment: Government standards approved in education and the resulting enculturation of the next generation is vastly different from a restaurant food safety checklist.

• “How draw a line between providing for the common social values required for a stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that is easier to mention than to define.” (1955) – My Comment: He does not answer his own question here.  However, this may be THE pivotal issue of a public money voucher system and the door it opens to infringement upon religious freedoms and parental rights.

Also Note: He doesn’t answer, but studies from other countries in later decades- Australia show that government funding of private education flattens out education control over time– “another consequence “ of the experiment of Australia’s policy of limited privatization of education begun in 1973 “was the increasing regulation and centralization of decisions and the loss of private school autonomy which limited the feasible range of options and will probably continue to do so in the future…most of these consequences were generic and would probably follow if this system were adopted in other countries” – “Private Education and Redistributive Subsidies in Australia” Estelle James (1991) in Privatization and Its Alternatives Ed. William Gormley

• “For the lowest level of education, there is considerable agreement, approximating unanimity on the appropriate content of an educational program for citizens of democracy—the three R’s cover most of the ground.” (1955)  My Comment: This is definitely not true today as leftist ideology permeates the curriculum down to the youngest grades.

• “But education is not open and shut. In Capitalism and Freedom we came out on the side of favoring compulsory schooling and in Free To Choose we came out against it. So I have become more radical in that sense. Murray used to call me a statist because I was willing to have government money involved. But I see the voucher as a step in moving away from a government system to a private system. Now maybe I’m wrong, maybe it wouldn’t have that effect, but that’s the reason I favor it.” -Friedman in Reason Interview 1995 https://reason.com/1995/06/01/best-of-both-worlds/ My Comment: He thought that vouchers would lead to more freedom from government but he had the faulty worldview that the family was merely expedient and the government needed to maintain a level of control through approval of minimal standards for use of its money at an “approved” school of the family’s choice.  We can already see that vouchers have not undermined the public system in the states thus far after decades of trials.

Bottom Line:  He was wrong on education vouchers leading to freedom from governmental indoctrination.