Education clearly tops the national agenda, but views on improving instruction of the nation's youth are widely divergent. In this issue of Chronicle Sunday, author Meredith Maran argues that the only way to remedy public schools is to abolish private ones. Author David Harmer takes the opposite tack; he believes that only private schools can provide the diverse approaches to learning that children with infinite varieties of aptitudes and challenges need. We also asked readers to tell us their thoughts on the topic; excerpts from their letters appear on the back page of this section.

For my sister-in-law Sharlene, it started with a phone call from the public school principal.

The local paper had editorialized on several public school issues. Sharlene wrote a letter to the editor lamenting that whichever side won the debates, every public school kid in the district would be subject to the resulting top-down, one-size-fits-all decisions. That made no sense to her.

Sharlene had enrolled her daughter Monica in a Montessori school that offered classes through the third grade. After that, she had no feasible alternative to the government school monopoly. (No other private schools were nearby, and she couldn't justify the extra expense of more distant alternatives when her taxes were already paying for public school.)

With respect to food, clothing, shelter, medical care and every other necessity, Sharlene wrote, she, as a consumer, could choose what was best for her children. Why was similar choice denied in education?

The public school principal read her letter and called. "Come see the good things we're doing here," he said. "I think you'd be glad to have your daughter in our school."

More for you News Many reluctantly choose private schools

The principal was proud of his school, one of the best in the county. After touring the well-appointed, well-maintained buildings and the expansive campus, Sharlene asked about curriculum. "Have the kindergartners learned their multiplication tables?" No, the principal replied, that comes later.

"What foreign languages can they learn?" None until junior high.

"How about performing arts?" Nothing offered.

"Monica's kindergarten class at Montessori knows their multiplication tables through the 12s," Sharlene replied. "They're learning Spanish. They just performed part of Shakespeare's 'Tempest.' Why would I move her here?"

"It's free?" the principal suggested.

Tuition at Monica's school was a fraction of the per pupil cost of public schools. There was nothing high-tech or high-cost about it -- but the air was crackling with achievement. Bright children, sparkling and eager, were experiencing the magic of learning in ways unavailable to their public school counterparts.

Of course, not all private schools excel, and not all public schools lag. On balance, however, the public school system does more to interfere with learning than to promote it. In the freest and most prosperous country on Earth, in the midst of the information age, government ownership and operation of the schools is a counterproductive anachronism.

Defenders of the education-industrial complex argue that Sharlene is atypical. Most children, they say, come from homes where the parents aren't sufficiently competent, caring or prosperous enough to provide for the education of their own children. I disagree.

Six years ago, I wrote "School Choice," a book making the case for a voucher system. Vouchers give parents consumer power, the financial ability to choose from among competing providers of schooling. Back then, the only voucher system in operation was in Milwaukee, Wis., and the teachers' unions were trying to strangle it.

Since then, the Milwaukee program has been greatly expanded, and numerous voucher programs elsewhere -- both publicly and privately funded -- have proven wildly popular, with demand far exceeding supply. These programs are restricted to the lowest-income students or those trapped in the worst schools. Given the opportunity to put their children into better schools, even disadvantaged parents jump at the chance.

So long as the state Constitution mandates free public schools, a voucher system (or refundable tuition tax credit) is the best we can do. To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools.

This is no utopian ideal; it's the way things worked through the first century of American nationhood, when literacy levels among all classes, at least outside the South, matched or exceeded those prevailing now, and when public discourse and even tabloid content was pitched at what today would be considered a college-level audience.

Schooling then was typically funded by parents or other family members responsible for the student, who paid modest tuition. If they couldn't afford it, trade guilds, benevolent associations, fraternal organizations, churches and charities helped. In this quintessentially American approach, free people acting in a free market found a variety of ways to pay for a variety of schools serving a variety of students, all without central command or control.

So accustomed have we grown to public schooling as a government-provided entitlement that we find it hard to believe that universal education of school-age children could be attained through voluntary, noncoercive, independent, private-sector means. But it was.

By the late 1880s, however, compulsory attendance at tax-funded government schools was mandated throughout most of the nation.

Not trusting the invisible hand of the market to achieve sufficiently egalitarian results, 19th century socialists and progressives increasingly relied on the heavy hand of government to work toward redistributing wealth -- a departure from the principles of the American founding. These ostensible egalitarians also believed that an increasingly complex world required central direction by a managerial elite.

In addition to these motivations, they promoted public education as a means of molding the children of southern European (i.e., Catholic) immigrants, frontier Mormons, the urban poor and other undesirables into more homogeneous Americans.

This impulse still drives opponents of educational freedom. Only the government schools, they argue, can foster a sufficiently homogeneous American society, where everyone shares a common culture and where children of all races, classes and religions must mingle and blend.

Independent schooling may allow improved individual achievement, they argue -- but at the cost of social balkanization.

These claims are silly. A common American culture flourished long before the advent of government-run public schools and flourishes independent of them today. Children of all races, classes and religions -- including those who attend private or home schools -- routinely mingle in youth soccer leagues, community choirs, Internet chat rooms, karate classes and a thousand other venues -- miraculously, without compulsory attendance laws or tax subsidies.

How will those of modest means afford education if it is not provided by the state? First, prices will plummet. As "School Choice" explains, the private sector already provides K-12 education superior to that offered by the state (yes, we factor out demographic and socioeconomic differences) at an average cost approximately half that incurred by the state. In a free market, competitive pressures would further reduce the cost of schooling.

As a transitional measure, the needy could receive means-tested vouchers (school stamps, like food stamps) or a refundable tax credit for tuition and other educational expenses (like the earned income tax credit). Similar credits are already expanding school choice in Arizona and Minnesota.

More fundamentally, we should reconsider where ultimate responsibility for schooling anyone's children resides. Having fathered my children, I am responsible for their welfare. Providing for their education is my duty, not anyone else's.

Kids aren't fungible products extruded from a factory somewhere. They come to school with an infinite variety of aptitudes, backgrounds, challenges, and possibilities. These require a commensurate variety of approaches to learning -- variety only a free market can provide.

HAVE YOUR SAY

WHAT PROPOSITION 38 WOULD DO Proposition 38 is a state ballot proposal that authorizes yearly payments of at least $4,000 per pupil for qualifying private and religious schools. It would permit the Legislature to replace current constitutional funding priority and Proposition 98 guarantees for public schools with new minimum per-pupil public school funding at no less than the national average. It would restrict regulation of private schools and exempt them from designated Uniform Building Code requirements. It would require academic testing in grant-redeeming schools. According to the state's legislative analyst and director of finance, Proposition 38 would result in a major rearrangement of the state's system of school finance, with growing annual savings in public school expenditures and growing annual costs of a new system of grants for children transferring to, or already attending, private schools. -- Source: The Web site of California's secretary of state ( www.ss.ca.gov ).-- Respond to THIS WEEK'S TOPIC at sunday@sfgate.com , or join the discussion at sfgate.com/vent/sunday. For other ways to reach us, see Page 8.