'Common' Mistakes

by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2013.

Slate.com, you're obviously trying to bait us with the headline of that Allison Benediktpost: "If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person." Well, good job. You succeeded.

The attention-grabbing "bad person" formulation is presumably facetious, but the underlying argument--that all parents ought to enroll their children in public schools--is not. Conservatives frequently accuse elite liberals, including President Obama and his most recent Democratic predecessor, of hypocrisy for proclaiming their devotion to public education while shielding their own children from it. Benedikt's argument is consistent with that criticism.

But that is not to say that it is logically sound. Here's her case:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad--but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation's-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what's-best-for-your-kidbad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I'm just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. . . .

So, how would this work exactly? It's simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don't send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

If Benedikt's argument is purely a matter of numbers, it is wholly implausible. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. public-school enrollment in prekindergarten through 12th grade was 49.4 million in 2009. Private-school enrollment was 5.5 million. There is no reason to think that public schools would be any better if only their enrollment grew by 11%. In fact, public-school enrollment increased by some 25% between 1985 and 2009 without, so far as we are aware, any of the kind of generational improvement Benedikt expects. (Private school enrollment declined during the same period, but by fewer than 100,000 students--so that most of the change was owing to demographics.)

Of course schoolchildren--and, more important from Benedikt's point of view, their parents--are not fungible. Her argument makes sense if one assumes that current private-school parents would be better able or more motivated to push for improvement than current public-school parents are. To put it another way, it's not that public schools need more students, but that they need students with a better class of parents. That's not an unreasonable assumption, but it is an inegalitarian one, which is likely why Benedikt left it unstated.

The biggest problem with Benedikt's argument is the fallacy of composition--of mistaking the part for the whole. We are willing to stipulate that improvements to the public schools are a common good--that all else being equal, better public schools would make everyone better off (although the benefit would be far from equally distributed).

But a common good is not the common good. Benedikt concedes that parents who follow her advice would be consigning their children to "mediocre educations." If that simply meant that the school experience would be less pleasant or personally fulfilling, then it would be accurate to characterize this as a personal sacrifice that would not diminish the common good. But if that were the case, it wouldn't enhance the common good either--only the private good of public-school students whose educations would be marginally more pleasant and fulfilling.

The assumption behind treating education as a public good is that in general, educating children makes them more successful adults, and successful people are more valuable to society than unsuccessful ones. If that is true, then consigning your child to a mediocre education is harmful to the common good, because it reduces his likelihood of success--which can mean everything from becoming a gainfully employed taxpayer to discovering a cure for cancer.

Benedikt's view of what constitutes "the common good" seems to be limited to the institutions of government. It's the flip side of the Dewey-Konczal theory that any "public" action--any action that affects anyone else--justifies government intervention. And like the Dewey-Konczal theory, the Benedikt argument leads in directions that liberals ought to find discomfiting.

For one thing, is this columnist a bad person? Wait, let us rephrase that: Are we a bad person according to Benedikt's argument? "Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools," she writes. We pay our property tax, but that's not enough. What's needed is "real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment."

We have no children in public schools (that we know of), because we have no children. If we did have a child in a public school, we suspect we would indeed take a keen interest in the quality of education, and we just might be savvy and persistent enough to have an impact. By remaining single and childless, we are having exactly the same impact on the quality of public schools as we would have if we married, fathered a child, and sent him to a private school. Intelligent, successful people who choose to remain childless are therefore just as bad as parents who send their children to private schools.

No, actually we're worse.

Education is not the only governmental function that is affected by the decision to have children or not. By depriving the future United States of taxpayers, we are hastening the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare and increasing their burden on other people's children. At least most children who go to private schools eventually end up paying taxes.

So childless men are worse people than parents who send their children to private school. But by Benedikt's logic, childless women are even worse people than childless men.

Individual men are reproductively expendable. While making a baby requires both a mother and a father, maintaining a population requires far more fertile women than fertile men. In his 2010 book, "Is There Anything Good About Men?," psychologist Roy Baumeister cites DNA studies that have found female ancestors of currently living human beings outnumber male ones by 2 to 1. If you're puzzled as to how that could be, consider that, as Baumeister notes, Genghis Khan is "said to have [fathered] hundreds of children, probably well over a thousand." It's unlikely any woman has come within an order of magnitude of that.

Thus an intelligent, successful woman who chooses to remain childless--or even to have fewer children than she can afford--is almost certainly acting against the "common good" of keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent. Allison Benedikt doesn't say whether she has any children. It's possible she's a bad person herself.