This article is adapted from a talk presented at the Mises Circle in Greenville, South Carolina, September 12, 2026.
There is an old saying, “When you send your child to Rome, don’t be surprised that he comes back Roman.” Or as Delano Squires said more recently, “You can’t sow Snoop Dogg and reap The Cosby Show.”
A free and prosperous society is maintained by transmitting sound cultural values and knowledge to the next generation. Frédéric Bastiat said that the twin evils facing society are the fatal tendency of mankind and false philanthropy. The fatal tendency of mankind is to try to live at the expense of others—to make others provide for our wants and desires. We do this directly by supporting wealth redistribution programs and indirectly by lobbying for special business privileges. False philanthropy is the use of the force and power of government to address the moral failings we see in others. Bastiat was right to warn against using the power of the government to reach into our neighbors’ pockets to relieve poverty, cure the sick, and educate the young.
We need to teach the importance of private property rights, free markets, and entrepreneurship, and that personal responsibility and freedom are what allow us to succeed or fail. The consequences of failing to educate through our schooling system cannot be overstated. Our society survives only if our children understand the difference between a system based on authoritarianism and one based on contracts and individuality. It is critical to learn Mises’s lesson of markets as he articulated it in Economic Freedom and Interventionism: “In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by their buying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, of what quality and in what quantity.” Those entrepreneurs who fail to efficiently please consumers lose their status as entrepreneurs. In the free market, the best minds serve the average person by making phones, cars, food, and every other good and service better. All businesses, regardless of size, must conform to the wants and desires of consumers. In contrast, the authoritarian system reflects the valuations of the few and the elite. Unfortunately, it is no secret that our educational system is failing to transmit the foundational values and precepts of a free and prosperous society. Those graduating from today’s high schools think that socialism and other authoritarian systems of social cooperation are the better path forward.
To start with a personal observation, I can attest that the students the government K-12 system produces today are not as advanced as those who graduated before covid. In fact, the problem extends beyond the past five or six years. There is a qualitative difference between my economic-principles students today and those of 1993, when I taught my first college-level course. And the problem did not start in the 1990s either. Before the government took over education, the United States had the most literate and educated population in the world: In the 1880s and 1890s, literacy rates were between 85% and 90%. Today’s students are learning less, yet somehow we see GPAs increasing.
Now we come to the first secret: The takeover of education was not to make us more knowledgeable; it was to make Americans more collectivist. It is common knowledge that one of the founders of our government school system, Horace Mann (1796–1859), favored the Prussian model of common schools. It emphasized uniformity and conditioned the students to become good subjects of the state. Later, the educational Progressive movement (1890s–1930s) was spearheaded by people such as John Dewey, Charles W. Eliot, and Richard T. Ely. They viewed the school system as a tool for creating social change and raising “social consciousness.” In 1892, Eliot, who was then president of Harvard, chaired the National Education Association Committee of Ten, which recommended a standardized curriculum and the organization of students into grade levels based on age rather than on achievement or mastery of the subjects.
Education became industrialized. Students were processed along an assembly line. They were the clay that the teachers shaped and molded. As Murray Rothbard points out in his essay “Education: Free and Compulsory,” “The effect of progressive education is to destroy independent thought in the child, indeed to repress any thought whatsoever. Subjects are taught as little as possible. . . . This program is being carried forward into high school, as well as grammar school, so that many high-school graduates are ignorant of elementary spelling or reading, and cannot write a cogent sentence.”
If you think this is an exaggeration, it’s not. Perhaps you have seen the viral Instagram video of Darius Williams, a high school teacher in the Houston Independent School District in Texas. He is a relatively new teacher. On his second day at Wheatley High School, he asked his class of seniors to read two paragraphs and answer a question by filling in four words in a couple of sentences. His video went viral because he was literally in tears. His testimonial was heartbreaking because these 17- and 18-year-olds could not do it. Williams truly cares about their future. These students are supposed to graduate in May 2027, and they are completely unprepared to be good citizens. Nevertheless, the Houston Independent School District said it is “proud of the progress the students are making.” I hunted around Williams’s Instagram a little more and saw the building and the classroom. It was a very nice classroom, nicer than where I work. Too often, we judge the quality of a school by the appearance of its facilities and the ivy on its walls. However, the real quality is found in the results. It may come as no surprise that in 2023, Wheatley High School was taken over by the state for failing its academic evaluations for seven consecutive years.
The second secret I want to share is that the most important factor in student success is the family, not the schools, not the teachers, and not the curriculum. The impact of parental involvement is substantial and significant. The Annie E. Casey Foundation is based in Maryland and focuses on at-risk children. Its research demonstrates the importance of parental involvement. When parents are involved in their kids’ lives, the outcomes are significantly better. This research is corroborated by nonprofits across the political spectrum, such as the Sutherland Institute (based in Utah), which states, “Research shows that parental involvement has crucial impacts on a student’s education outcomes like better rates of attendance, motivation and graduation.” The academics agree. In their 2020 article “Family Structure Stability and Transitions, Parental Involvement, and Educational Outcomes,” published in the journal Social Sciences, Pribesh et al. write, “Researchers studying family structure have found that children who live with two married, opposite-sex, biological parents, on average, have better educational outcomes than children living in alternate family structures.” If we are serious about improving education, we should strengthen its foundation—the traditional family—and encourage parental involvement.
However, the educational establishment rejects this secret. In his education article, Rothbard recorded that in 1898 The Public Education Association of Philadelphia “resolved that as long as there are ignorant or selfish parents, compulsion must be used in order to safeguard the child’s rights.” The problem the educational establishment focuses on is the parents. And they are amazingly consistent. Today, we need only look to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and her stance on who should control students. Who should determine what subjects the students learn? Who should determine what is and what is not important? Not the parents. Furthermore, Weingarten advocates allowing teachers to withhold students’ “true names” from their parents. She opposes parents’ right to choose which school to send their children to. We see that nothing has changed since the nineteenth century. The teachers’ union and the government school system claim superiority over parents. After all, they are the experts. Parents and the traditional family are obstacles to be overcome.
Our tragedy is even deeper. With the rise of the welfare state, we have seen the decline of the traditional family. The science of economics informs us that incentives are very important in shaping societal trends. In 1960, 9% of households were single-parent homes. According to US Census data, in 1970, the year I was born, single-parent households jumped up to 12.8%. Each year thereafter the family structure has eroded. By 1982, the share of single-parent homes doubled to 24.6%. The share climbed to 32% by 1997 and has fluctuated between 28% and 31% since. And 40% of the babies born in 2022 were born to unmarried mothers.
The family has been destroyed by the welfare state and the expansion of government. Welfare incentivizes the breakdown of the family. It actively discourages fathers from being in the household. With the father not in the home, there is a lack of a male role model, and the connection between generations is lost. Inflation, caused by perpetual deficits, has made it necessary for mothers to join the workforce. Children are sent to daycare and raised by non–family members. The educational establishment believes that the government school system can and should fill this void. The welfare state and Progressive educational reform did not cause one another, but they are synergistic. Eliminating or reducing one will have spillover effects on the other. As an Austrian economist, I can say that the welfare state could not be sustained if we had a balanced federal budget. If we want to go even deeper, we can see that the federal deficits are perpetuated by fiat money. They are a fundamental support of the welfare state. Thus, a return to sound money is a cure for many of our social evils.
The third secret is that high teacher salaries are not necessary for good educational outcomes. It seems that with every budget cycle in Raleigh (the capital of North Carolina, where I live), we hear the same chorus, “If we don’t pay our teachers more, we will lose all the good ones.” Obviously, to some extent this is true, but we are missing the bigger question: What is the right amount to pay teachers? Every time I ask it, I get the same answer: More. But this is not an answer.
In the private sector, wages are tied to what economists call the value marginal product of labor. It basically says that, in equilibrium, a person should earn the value he adds to the product. Of course, this is never exact. And technically, the employee is subjectively valuing his wage relative to his opportunity cost of working. Meanwhile, the employer is also comparing subjective valuations. But for the purposes of this talk, we can consider this a rough estimate. Here is a simple example. If an employee adds value to the company at a rate of $15 per hour, can it afford to pay him $20 per hour? No, or at least not for long. And if the company pays this employee $10 per hour, what will happen? The employee will look for alternative employment and leave the company. Thus, in a free market, the wage rate tends toward the value the employee creates for the company.
When the employee generates more value, his wage rate should rise. Suppose the company buys a new machine that increases the employee’s productivity. Certainly, the value marginal product of labor increases and wages rise, but I want to draw your attention to who purchased the new machine. Yes, the owner bought the new machine. Do I mean to say that the owner will spend a large capital sum on a new machine and then be forced by market forces to pay his employees more? Absolutely. That is precisely what I mean. How can this work? For our answer, we need to take a step back and see the bigger picture. The employer buys the machines, and the employees become more productive. As output expands, the employer’s per-unit cost falls. He lowers the price and draws new consumers away from his competitors. Revenues increase so much that he has the funds to pay for the increased value marginal product of labor. In other words, he is able to give the employees a cut from his success. Thus, the owner wins. The employees win. The makers of the new machines win. Consumers win. And the competitors need to rise to the challenge or suffer losses. This process is how companies grow and living standards rise.
My question to all those who answered that teachers should get “more” is: What new technique or new process have educators come up with that has increased their value and productivity? In other words, what is the educational equivalent of the new machine that increases workers’ value marginal product of labor? I am not looking for a quantitative number, such as how many students are processed per teacher, but I think we should be able to ask what they have done to improve educational outcomes. And if we base teacher salary on recent student outcomes, teachers might need to take a pay cut rather than receive a raise.
North Carolina recently passed its state budget. For the 2026–27 school year, the salary for a new teacher with zero experience is $48,000 for a 10-month contract (this does not include nonpecuniary benefits such as health insurance). As experience, certifications, and higher degrees accumulate, the salary increases, reaching a maximum of $74,510 for a 10-month contract. Additionally, principals are paid up to $120,000 per year, and superintendents can receive more than $167,000 annually.
How does the state of North Carolina set wages for teachers? Yes, there is a political process that includes lobbying, but let’s set that aside for a moment and assume we are all honest bureaucrats, really trying to get the price right. We are facing F. A. Hayek’s knowledge problem. There is no market price for government schoolteachers. We could look at private schools, but since the public sector controls over 80% of the students, private schools’ salaries are based on the legislators’ actions, not the other way around. What really happens is that the budget writers in North Carolina look at salaries in neighboring states such as South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. They then compare cost-of-living indices and other metrics to justify a “fair” salary. If these other states had completely private educational systems, this could be a close approximation of market rates, but no state has a robust private educational system. Government schools dominate in every state. The system is one in which our bureaucrats are adjusting to what other bureaucrats are doing in other states, all the while the other states’ bureaucrats are adjusting to us and everyone else. Without a market process, there is no mechanism to determine the correct height of teacher wages.
There are other secrets that I could add, like experts are terrible at delivering good education. While it is assumed that a person with a master’s degree is a better teacher than someone with just a bachelor’s degree, the evidence shows this isn’t true. The outcomes are the same. While the education professionals have tried to improve student outcomes by creating “new math,” rejecting phonics, and pursuing several other loony tangents, they have actually worsened them. But I want to end on a more optimistic note.
Let us take a look at the fourth secret: Homeschooling is not that hard, and it produces the best results. I have three children, and my wife and I homeschooled each of them. We started with homeschooling the oldest through the first grade. Then we got nervous and enrolled him in a private religious school. It was expensive, and the results were no different. In fact, they were less than what I was hoping for. For two years he asked to return to homeschooling. My oldest daughter was a little different. She really liked interacting with other girls her age, but again the educational outcomes were underwhelming. It was too costly to send her to school just to socialize. Our third child has only been homeschooled.
When we started homeschooling, we had all the same questions and fears as everyone else. We discovered that homeschooling is amazing. We did not have to be up at a certain time waiting for a bus. We knew exactly what the kids were learning and how well they were progressing. When one of them wanted to learn something I knew nothing about, like chemistry, we outsourced it! (How many homeschoolers are learning their economics from the Mises Institute?) The most surprising thing I discovered is that learning doesn’t have to take all day. From kindergarten through eighth grade, the kids were basically done by lunchtime. We changed the curriculum when we needed to. Because my kids are different people, they learn differently. One needed more tactile lessons, so we changed the way we taught math. Another was more interested in music and languages. We could easily adjust because there are so many tools at our fingertips. At one point, I realized that my son was absolutely lost in math. What did we do? We backtracked to a point where he knew the material. Then we started again from that point. What government schoolteacher would or could do that?
Additionally, we are not tied to any one location. We have traveled around the Carolinas and walked through the battlefields of Guilford Courthouse, Alamance, and Bentonville. We have visited Bennett Place, Kitty Hawk, Tryon Palace, Kings Mountain, the historic state capitol, and Colonial Williamsburg. The museums in Raleigh even host homeschool days that offer homeschoolers behind-the-scenes access to labs and experiments.
In North Carolina, there are more homeschoolers than students enrolled in private schools. Here are the numbers: For the 2025–26 school year, there were 1,381,437 students enrolled in government schools. Private schools enrolled 143,998 students, about a tenth of that number. In North Carolina, we do not have to report to the government the number of students in our homeschools. What is recorded is the number of homeschools, which stood at 95,190. The nonprofit group North Carolinians for Home Education says the most reasonable estimate is that, on average, there are two students per homeschool. This places the number of homeschooled students at just under 200,000. Thus, the government system has about 80% of the students; the homeschoolers account for approximately 12%; and private school students make up the remaining 8%. The North Carolina homeschooling community is large. And because it is so large, there are many, many businesses that cater to it. Each year there is a homeschool conference in Winston-Salem. Over 35,000 people attend and fill the city’s entire conference center. The dozens of vendors fill an entire floor. And despite the community being so large, it feels small. The children have their own events and independently explore the vendor hall. What is amazing is that they are comfortable integrating with people of all ages and not just those in their cohort. The older kids look after the younger ones.
Closer to home, we have several co-ops, which are networked together. Co-ops utilize parents with specific talents or skills and allow them to teach the group’s children. For example, my children have taken classes in literature, Latin, painting, and archery at our local co-op. I have taught economics to some high schoolers and also to elementary schoolers. Parents freely join these groups and leave as their needs change. Experienced families help newcomers and welcome them in.
It is obviously not a perfect system, but it is far better than the alternatives. Colleges and universities, especially the private ones, greedily seek out homeschoolers. They know the value these students bring to campus.
And one final note on homeschooling: Homeschooling does not “steal” from the government schools. Government education is either the first- or second-largest budget item in every state. If I withdraw my kids from the government system, I do not receive a tax refund compensating me for the difference. The school budget is just divided among fewer students.
Overall, our educational system is a mess, and we need to do better. Only a few political issues have shifted to the right over the past 40 years: We have seen an improvement in Second Amendment issues and with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But the shift in the Overton window on school choice is new and unexpected. I think that covid forced parents to confront what was actually being taught in their local schools. The current system, which assigns students to specific schools, is the worst possible system we could have. And yet it is the most common. Allowing parents to choose which school to send their kids to is an improvement, but it is not a solution.
If we want a free and prosperous society to continue, we need full educational freedom. Today’s students are sliding toward socialism because they are ignorant of history and economic theory. We keep sending our kids to Rome, and they are returning as Romans. We cannot expect a government employee to teach children the value of the free market. There is no single magic bullet that can save the day. There is no central plan for freedom. What is required is that all of us do what we can to pull in the direction of free markets, private property rights, and sound money. Sometimes we need to be the example. Other times, we need to confront the errors of socialism when attending city council and school board meetings. And still other times, we need to put a book in a student’s hand, look them in the eye, and tell them about the impact that Rothbard, Mises, and the other Austrians have had on our lives. When I do this, I find that the students will actually read the book. Whether they become Austrian economists or not is beyond my control, but what is needed is action. Don’t look at today as the end of a successful Mises Institute event; look at it as just the beginning of a much longer and more fruitful journey that we can take together.
