America's education system would be more effective if completely privatized.

I would like to begin this rebuttal with a quote I heard once. Though I cannot remember its exact wording or who said it, the idea remains key to the question currently being dealt with: In a free market, not the best, but the most popular ideas win out. This fact would be ok in the consideration of privatizing any other sector, but education is necessarily the development of minds that try to discover and hold the best, not the most popular ideas (". .. developing the powers of reasoning and judgment. .. "). Reason-to think through logically, as a problem (often followed by out ). (1) In logic, appeal to popularity or convention is a recognized fallacy. (2) As my opponent describes, a privatized education system will work to attract consumers. Therefore what will be success or not will not be a matter of the quality of the idea/teaching system, but the appeal of the teaching system to consumers. Its primary value is popularity and not rationality. Since reason is included in the accepted definition of education, privatization must be considered at odds with its goal and therefore necessarily rendering the education system less effective. "As you have mentioned, privatizing a sector of our economy does indeed make that product/service cheaper to the consumer. This partially contributes to the argument of privatization of education being more effective. Competition does lead to a decline in price. When a product/service is made efficiently in a competitive environment, this decline in price results in an increase in availability to society. One purpose of having an effective education system is to deem it affordable and usable to as many people as possible. With this decline in price, more people will be able to afford it and have access to it; therefore, the lower price of education does contribute to it being more effective overall. " This is a very peculiar argument as a public education system is already accessible to all. If the argument is that access to more people will render an education more effective than privatization can only reduce effectiveness as it cannot be available to more than 100% of people. "Secondly, another major factor that businesses must consider in order to maximize profit is the quality of the product/service. Quality is also a major contributor to the effectiveness of a product/service. The higher the quality, the more adequate it is to accomplish its purpose. The quality must be competitive with other schools of the specific price range. In terms of quality, results, and overall satisfaction, the businesses which succeed in a competitive market must cater to all needs/wants of the consumers (the consumer being the purchase of the education). A high quality service, in this situation, would mean that the education effectively teaches the children the specified material, and successfully prepares them for the job they wish to pursue (or merely basic life skills). " While quality is an important factor it can as much be a calculated low quality as a push for a high quality that drives a business model. The Ford Pinto case is an excellent example of this. Ford manufactured a sub-standard car that was in fact dangerous. They did this because it was cheaper to make the car badly and pay out the lawsuits that it would have been to make the car at a higher quality. (3) In fact, this very concept is the basis for the "dollar store" business model (except for the lawsuit part). It is also the basis for the fast food industry. An entire industry that does not provide nutritious or good quality food, but food that is meant only to be appealing and arguably addictive. Therefore, it should be rejected that private schools will necessarily attempt a higher quality of education if a lower quality of education offers greater profit. What's more, my opponent says that the purpose of the private school system is to satisfy the consumer (i. e. the parent) not the child. This only works towards a more effective education system, if we accept that parents always both want and know what's best for their child. I am sure that anyone who has had a parent will know that this is most definitely not always the case. A parent may want a child to be a doctor and they may want to be a painter. With private schools children's freedom is limited to their economic capacity, whereas a public system whose standards are created by experts in the field, may be flawed, but offers training in all subjects and offers children the ability to be involved in their own education, while still affording an important role to the parents. My opponent goes onto state that a quality service in this case is job training for the child's chosen job, but this has been shown to be contradictory, one because "job training" is not included in the definition of education and two because it is the parent's ideal job for their children not the child's ideal job that the school is catering to. "Thirdly, along with the maximization of profit comes competitive wages. In order for businesses to succeed, they must have not just hard working employees, but "smart" working employees (they must be effective in helping the business succeed). Many factors contribute to obtaining hard working employees, one of which is employee wage. In order for an employee to stay working at a business in a relatively free market, it is generally not possible for that employee to get a similar job elsewhere that offers a higher wage. This forces the business to offer a competitively high wage, which the employee agrees on. Higher wages, in this instance, means teachers make a decently high amount of money. Although, competitive wages also result in an upper wage boundary. Higher wages result in a higher price to the consumer, and is therefore also limited in a relatively free market. Teachers will end up being paid what they agree is a "fair" wage; a wage that is not too high or not too low. " The definition of a teacher's "productivity" is drastically different in a private versus public system. In a public system, the teacher's only measurement is how effectively his or her children learn, in a private school system, the measurement is how can a teacher minimize the number of hours she or he spends with their students and maximize the appearance of success so as to satisfy both present and potential future clients. This promotes inflated marks for the worst students and streamlined subject matter that makes it as mechanistic as possible to teach (comparative advantage). This may lead to a productive businss, but is certainly not effective education. Conclusion: My opponent makes the faulty assumption that providing the best possible service is the best way to generate profit. While I accept that it is one business model, because there are other business models demonstrated in everything from the car to the dollar store industry, it becomes unacceptable to say that privatization would necessarily make the education system more effective. Even this major flaw becomes irrelevant, when we consider that privatization runs categorically counter to the purposes of education accepted for this debate, namely to train reasonable minds. Popularity rather than rationality would govern a private school system thus, at the most fundamental level undermining its effectiveness. (1) . http://dictionary.reference.com... (2) . http://www.nizkor.org... (3) . http://en.wikipedia.org...