I remember listening on itunes to one of Jeffrey Tucker's lectures and he was talking about some old school system where it was completely privatized and saying how it was extremely cheap and talking about their method of the students paying it forward and teaching other students. For the life of my I can't find that lecture now. Does anyone know what podcast/lecture I'm talking about? Or what example Tucker was referring to in the lecture? Or maybe I'm remembering it wrong and it wasn't Jeffrey Tucker. But it was definitely one of the Mises podcasts.
To add to that, does anyone know of any really good, hopefully well documented, cases of private schooling that didn't have to compete against public schooling in people being forced to pay for both through taxes?
Spinney: I'm unfamiliar with the lecture you're talking about. However, I would point out that public schooling is actually a very recent phenomenon (150 years, max). Prior to 150 years ago, "schooling" and "private schooling" were synonymous. There were some of the large universities that got some money from the government but all other education was, without exception, private. The church also played a very large role in education but the church is essentially private wherever attendance is voluntary and its revenues are collected by voluntary offerings and not coerced. I'm unfamiliar with the "pay it forward" system but you can look at private education of the upper-middle and wealthy classes in 19th century England and America for an example of how the education market works sans competition from a publicly-funded monopoly.
Clayton -
I believe Stefan Molyneaux has a podcast where he talks about that.
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