Why does the state pay when a senior chooses his treatment, but not when a minor chooses his education? Who gets dignity and who gets a pat on the head?

A seventy-year old Medicare recipient chooses his doctor, books (or not) his own appointments, agrees (or not) to recommended procedures, and the state pays. 

With privacy, information and selection, the senior
chooses his care, and the state pays.

A WIC recipient shops like you and me at a grocery store. But a 16 year-old is taken to the school that serves his zone, is assigned (mostly) to classes, assigned books, assigned timing, assigned goals. If he chooses differently, he pays--twice (because his parents already paid taxes).

We shouldn’t be surprised that surveys of student perceptions about public secondary schools in aggregate are so bleak. Fewer than 15% enjoy going to secondary school. As Christensen finds in his 2008 study, Disrupting Class, most secondary students would prefer to do something else with their time. More than 80% indicate that what they’re seeking from school is time with friends and feeling good about themselves--not priorities that schools design for. Bryan Caplan describes a climate of cynicism and superficial engagement in The Case Against Education: minimal effort applied to achieve acceptable grades, decreasing hours invested in study, avoidance of difficult classes or assignments not required for graduation, celebration at class cancellations, and pervasive self-reported cheating. Hardly the behavior of a consumer paying for a service.

Healthcare makes a good comparison, because we similarly treat access as a social imperative, but the patient is the consumer, and we believe he should pay for a given service only once. A senior starts with a range of online tools, he considers how he’d like to address his needs. He can find and compare providers, consider distance, years of experience, other patients’ reviews. He can walk away from a recommendation. He can seek a second opinion. He can change course midstream. He can complain, post feedback, file a lawsuit. Medicare is a cash transfer (within constraints) that enables the senior’s decision-making about caring for his own health.

The secondary student, by contrast, is a non-entity. The group he’ll be assigned into, the books they’ll read, the content that’s prioritized,

You can choose where you'd like to sit.

have largely been determined before his arrival and irrespective of his interests. By contrast to the senior, his choices are so minuscule and choreographed as to be insulting-- he can choose his seat in the room; he can choose from three essay topics; he can choose his lab partner (maybe). That the service is good or bad, useful or irrelevant, is measured not by his own assessment, but by a concocted measure of utility devised without ever consulting him. There are no star-ratings for this chapter or that, for this classroom, for this assignment, for this teacher. Did this day exceed/meet/underwhelm your expectations? 

Any feedback mechanism to the many services inside a public school is necessarily indirect: through parents,

Never seen in a public school.

through volunteer organizations, through a long chain of command. Community fundraising likewise benefits students indirectly. Rarely do you see a direct cash transfer to students to select learning options. Instead, laptops, smartboards, voting devices, musical instruments-- are owned, managed, and allocated by the school district. Most critically, in very few places do students have the means to vote with their feet. And in most of those cases, if they choose, then they pay twice. Public secondary school is a state monopoly that allocates resources on behalf of teens according to its own determination of what is collectively good education.

Teenagers are even non-entities in the social iconography of their own lives. In the paeans to school and teachers, teenagers play the role of cherub props. The impassioned voices are not teenagers, but politicians and public figures. They massage our civic imagination of downtown-parades-Oprah’s-book-club-apple-pie-and-cute-puppy-uploads. An actual teenage personality had better be airbrushed in this sepia-tinted world.

Part of the problem of teen students as non-entities is the extension of parents’ simplified management style going back to rearing smaller children. The breadwinners call the shots. They can’t handle another headache. While you live under my roof… and so on.

But it’s not only parents that ride along on teens’ non-entity status. It’s also an industry of child-management (only a fraction of this growth is actually teachers!) that validates and expands itself. It does this through an impassioned, heart-rending double-speak that makes an icon of teen-rearing while nullifying the teen and reappropriating his resources. University administrations latch-on and extend the same iconography: the sacred raising of young minds (nevermind our tuition hikes, monopolistic and untransparent practices, and the career-irrelevance problem).

In any other industry, it’s unheard to say that the industry itself is saintly, even if the overall purpose it’s serving is useful, live-or-die stuff. The heroic healthcare industry?

In his September 1990 address to the United Nations
on the occasion of the World Summit for Children
 and signing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
Vaclav Havel lamented years of “bent backs” and “servitude
to hated regimes” supposedly in the name of children.
He recounted horrors of totalitarian regimes “all this
 for the fake happiness of generations yet unborn in some
 fake paradise”, and he wished “if it were possible, I would
add another paragraph to the agreement I signed this morning.
That paragraph would say that it is forbidden for parents and
adults in general to lie, serve dictatorships, inform on others,
bend one's back, be scared of dictators, and betray one's friends
and ideals in the name and for the alleged interest of children,
and that it is forbidden for all murderers and dictators to pat
children on the head". ...We would wave off such a comparison
to compulsory school as hyperbole. But we would also shepherd
children--with great fanfare-- to 1500 hours per year stripped
of civil rights, driven by compulsion, silenced as consumers,
straight-jacketed as decision-makers. 

The martyrs of American food production? How would you feel about a poster with a United Airlines spokesperson patting a radiant passenger on his head? Even childcare centers and assisted living facilities don’t get the mushiness that is heaped collectively on schools.

No consumer is a radiant cherub. No $12,000 sale* is made on mush-factor. Something is missing-- what??

It’s the teenager! The teenager is absolutely a consumer! He or she needs encouragement and guidance, yes. Needs reminders and nudging and discipline, sure. But the teenager should compare and choose, take or leave recommendations, personally assess progress on terms which are valuable to him/herself, change course, vote with his/her feet, and give feedback. When we recognize secondary education as an $206 billion business with 15.1 million consumers**, we will-- as Vaclav Havel exhorts-- stop patting children on their heads, and compete to offer relevant, convenient, timely services. It’s not the end of the world when teenagers call more of the shots for their learning. It’s the end of an abusive hypocrisy.

*The range of per student per annum expenditure by schools varies by state, with New York ($21,206) Alaska ($20,172), District of Columbia ($19,396) Connecticut ($18,377) and New Jersey ($18,235) at the high end, and low-end states as low as $7000. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/cb17-97-public-education-finance.html?cid=public-education-finance

**Total spending in 2018 for grade 9-12 education by public schools in U.S., and number of enrolled students in public schools grades 9-12 same year. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

What’s an hour worth? Political prisoners teach us about the time-value (and human value) of self-determination

What is an hour of your time? Is it your output? Some benchmark wage? Even if you put a price on it, you know it’s something more. It’s not only making, it’s also being. And being doesn’t want a value-number, because being is too proud for that. An hour of being doesn’t promise anything. It demands full freedom for itself. Being presumes its own value.

Nietzsche wrote in Will to Power:
There is a solitude within him [sic: the “higher man”] that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.

Isaiah Berlin expanded on this idea in The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
It makes no difference whether a man’s own inner light shines for others or not; nor whether he serves it successfully; serve it he must, even if he makes himself ridiculous in the process, even if all he does ends in failure. Indeed this sort of failure is considered as being morally infinitely superior to worldly success, even success as an artist-- provided only that it is the fruit of the blind and exclusive service of what a man knows to be his mission, of what the inner voices tell him that he must do.

As one who loves the literature of political dissidents,

Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in the gulags,
including hard labor at Ekibastuzin in
northern Kazakhstan.
solzhenitsyncenter.org/timeline/

I take a lesson from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Liu Xiaobo and Milan Kundera. There is something in human time that thrives on its own free expression and withers under external control. An hour intrinsically motivated is something very different from an hour (or decade) extrinsically compelled. On the Central Asian steppe, in a Chinese re-education camp, in a prison in Czechoslovakia, these three were subjected to the crushing monotony of arbitrary, externally-imposed ritual. And make no mistake, such ritual is purposefully designed.

Kundera's early novel The Joke is considered
 a partly autobiographical account of arrest,
humiliation and prison sentence which the
author himself endured, narrowly avoiding
death penalty, and serving 14 years in a
Czechoslovak prison. 

To the letter it elevates and painstakingly justifies itself (why else carefully recorded confessions?), creates and sustains a massive bureaucratic machinery around itself (surely so many blouse- and tie-wearing officers cannot be wrong!), metes out soul-crushing brutality alongside ludicrous rituals of hygiene, productivity and patriotism, and always, unfailingly, documents, documents, documents!!

I often wish that anybody fervent about teen well-being would take the time to get acquainted with Solzhenitsyn, Xiaobo and Kundera.

They lived in systems that treated/treat the human spirit as a mush to be smashed and remolded into a thing: thing-1, thing-2 and thing-3. They should plug into machines that whistle and click, and a uniform glob should plop out the other side. It should plop cheerfully and reliably. This to the smiling, nodding approbation of

Liu Xiaobo was one of few Nobel Laureates held in prison
and unable to receive the award personally. He died in July 2017 not
long after release from prison. 

doe-eyed co-conspirators--classmates, co-workers, neighbors--who unflinchingly turned them over for arrest. These authors were unstoppable voices. But behind them were/ARE snuffed out millions that these machines in their perfect rhythm successfully digest.

Living at various times in Moscow, Kyiv and Astana over the past twenty years, I have only brushed with the machinery that continues to grind human time in the state clinics, post offices, railway ticket-counters, internats and state department stores--remnants of a deeply-ingrained culture of soul-smashing. The quiet, patient plodding from queue to queue, the never-quite-complete bundle of documents, the pleading, smiling offerings to petty demons, the rank smell of bad plumbing, the shrieking calls to wear paper shoe-covers. As a foreigner, I could observe--with irritation--from the privileged vantage-point of one not depending on or bound-into these systems. At the oncology center in Astana, I brought my kids and made small-talk during chemo. Notwithstanding the barking of the shoe-cover lady, impatience of the blood-tester nurse (we had to do it in a line), and the occasional cursing tirade from another patient, I tried to make the best of the hours there. The head nurse was fascinated with me and called me into his office for tea. ‘You’re the only patient we have who wants to go on living,’ he told me.

So what is an hour? For one thing, it’s defiantly not being dead.

Maybe there should be two different words for an hour. Here is an hour that celebrates the machine. It goes click-rattle-plop-plop. It sucks in the mush on one side, and pushes out the plop plop on the other. It generates the false hum of false progress. Its laborers dig ditches in the morning that they will fill in the afternoon, its farmers lean on hoes over crops that will be reappropriated, its production quotas, harvest yields, birth rates(!!) boast an impossible unity of compliance and desire.

Here is an hour that celebrates the man. It races by while he stutters and gasps to express himself. He flails and fights against monotony, fights to be meaningful.

These hours are not defined by geography or politics, but by our own estimation of the human being. Make no mistake that so-called free countries also hold task-masters, pinheads and bean-counters. How easily would we trade hours and years of another person’s life for the reassuring whistle-click-plop-plop, the reliability, the ritual, the documents? Who are we crushing along the way?