Why You Pay for Other People's Kids to Go to School

One question frequently asked these days is why a person with no children should pay for the education of other people’s children. So here goes:

Before the rise of representative governments, free markets and secularism, power was in the hands of a few people. The “divinely appointed” kings and their vassals had land and weapons. Land meant food. Weapons meant they would kill you if you didn’t adhere to their social order, which basically consisted of “This is my stuff and if you touch it without permission I will stab you with my sword.” The Church also had lands and weapons, but also had the market cornered on learning and on ideology. The ideology of the day consisted of “Do what we say or we will not only kill you in this life, we will make your afterlife very unpleasant.” These power holders wanted cheap agricultural labor. People didn’t need to know how to read to do that work. Additionally it always becomes evident, sooner or later, that when people start reading they start asking pesky questions and making trouble.

Flash forward to colonial America. Many colonials were religious fanatics who wanted to read the Bible for themselves. They were allowed to go to the colonies because nobody in Europe liked them and it was dangerous work being a colonist, so you might as well send people you don’t like, because you won’t see them again. The colonists went to war with their mother country. They lost almost every battle. They won the war. Various reasons can account for this but one reason is that it is hard to kill ideas, and the British were fighting ideas as much as Minutemen.

These ideas were shared among the colonists in newspaper, pamphlets, and word of mouth. Eventually, some of these ideas became laws. On top of that, as the financial institutions of the world were undergoing rapid transition also, something called the middle class arose. These people ran businesses or had trades and therefore needed more education. There were a fair number of these people in the New World. So ideas, words, and their natural ally education were cornerstones of the new republic.

When people don’t have educations their ability to work decent jobs becomes severely limited. They make less money than educated people. They become part of a marginalized impoverished underclass. They turn to crime, violence, drugs, alcohol, and they don’t make very good citizens in general. People in America thought that having a populace that was educated and personally invested in the political process is a better thing than having an ignorant, unskilled and uninvolved populace. Those Founding Troublemakers, in other words, wanted a nation of troublemakers.

We have managed to hold on to this precious bit of egalitarian thought for a couple hundred years. Those opponents of paying taxes for schools, many of who of course are products of the public school system, simply don’t understand the importance of education for a healthy society.
You pay for schools because you went to one. You pay for schools so little Johnny next door can get a decent job and not break into your house to steal your stuff or kill you. You pay for schools because your country doesn’t die when you do. You pay for schools as an investment in freedom. If you don’t have kids or you opt-out of the public school system you still live in a society that relies on public schools, and so you pay.