Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Even when they work well%2C public schools introduce all sorts of costs and rigidities into everyday life.

Today%2C you can buy a thousand kinds of shampoo%2C so why should your kid have only one kind of education%3F

Many parents are embracing alternative education%2C like homeschooling or online school.

Last week, I wrote here about zero-tolerance stupidity, suggesting that as schools grow more and more willing to punish and stigmatize kids for reasons of bureaucratic convenience, it might be parental malpractice to put your kids in public schools. But there's another problem with public schools that goes beyond these kinds of problems: Even when they work well, public schools introduce all sorts of costs and rigidities into everyday life.

That's not surprising. Public schools were designed to be rigid. Back in the 19th century, when Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann toured Europe looking for models of public education to import to America, the one he chose came from Prussia. Inflexibility and uniformity were Prussian specialties, and when Mann brought Prussian-style education to America, those characteristics were seen not as a bug but as a feature.

School was practice for working in the factory. Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of individual students.

This had its advantages back during the Industrial Revolution, an assembly-line era where uniformity was more important than anything else, when Henry Ford was happy to sell you a car in any color you wanted, so long as it was black. But this is the 21st century, and now times have changed. You can buy a thousand different kinds of shampoo, so why should your kid have only one kind of education?

Many parents, thus, are embracing alternative education -- like homeschooling or online school -- not only as a way of escaping the often-poor instructional quality and questionable discipline of public schools, but also as a way of escaping the rigidities they bring.

It's easy to miss just how much inflexibility is introduced into American life by the traditional public school approach, but those rigidities are legion.

Real estate prices, for example, are heavily influenced by the quality of local public schools. Poor people often can't afford to attend top-flight public schools because they can't afford to live in the wealthy district. People who own property in those districts, meanwhile, stand to lose a significant amount of their home's value if the school board rezones them into a district with less-favored schools. Often people are forced to live in areas they'd otherwise rather not -- because of long commutes, for example -- simply in order to avail their kids of a decent education. By cutting the link between location and school quality, those problems could be eliminated, likely resulting in substantial savings for society -- and parents.

And the intractibility isn't just about space. It's also about time. Without a public school schedule, vacations can be taken when the family wants to, not when school bureaucrats schedule them; school days can be moved around to accommodate parents' work schedules and medical needs, and, perhaps most importantly, kids with more flexible school hours are more able to enter the workplace, which can be more educational than many things that happen in school.

I can attest to this firsthand. My daughter did most of her high school online, after spending one day in ninth grade keeping track of how the public high school she attended spent her time. At the end of eight hours in school, she concluded, she had spent about 2½ hours on actual learning.

Switching to online school let her make sure that every hour counted. The flexibility also allowed her to work three days a week for a local TV-production company, where she got experience researching and writing for programs shown on the Biography Channel, A&E, etc., something she couldn't have done had she been nailed down in a traditional school. And she still managed to graduate a year early, at age 16, to head off to a "public Ivy" to study engineering. Did she miss out on socializing at school? Possibly, but at her job she got to spend more time with talented, hardworking adults, which may have been better. (And, as a friend pointed out, nobody ever got shot or pregnant at online school.)

Our experience with the flexibility offered by online schooling was a real eye-opener: You tend to take the restrictions imposed by the public school system for granted, as part of the background, until suddenly they're gone. I predict that over the next few years, a lot more eyes will open. Public schools will have to work hard if they are to keep up.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs atInstaPundit.com.





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