There’s a lot of assumptions built into his reply. We clearly need to go to a deeper level.
Seems to be based on that assumption that private schools are more expensive and public ones cheaper. But when you look at elementary school costs, the terrible public schools spend much much more than the best private schools. And places where the most money per child is being spent, namely DC, also has among the worst performing students.
Secondly, he can’t know how the cost structure would change if public education wouldn’t exist. We would argue costs would go down considerably due to mass participation. Similarly, he can’t know how much more wealthy society would be if it weren’t siphoning off tax money to pay for schools. He and/or his parents may have been wealthy enough to send him to school no problem.
A lot of the cost of schools is due to the limited numbers of them, accreditation controlled by the government. Get a free market for education going and you’d have competition for students, meaning the result would be the best combination of price, product, and efficiency.
This assumes that either fewer people would be educated to the same extent in a free market for education, or that enough people wouldn’t be able to afford it that the same outcome would occur. Neither of which is certain and quite likely the opposite. In the 19th century, when we did have a market for education, we still had nearly universal education. So where exactly is the basis for his claim? If anything we’d have much better education because today’s Dewey system is focused on socialization instead of the, say, Montessori goal of rational conceptualization, of teaching students to think.
Beyond that, he’s rationalizing away an evil means with a supposedly noble goal. No good goal can redeem an evil means.
Mere speculation. But the root cause, again, is his sense that the world owed him an education, a subconscious collectivist conviction, that he wouldn’t have been able to stand on his own two feet and achieve what he has in a world more individualist than the one we’re in now. It is the fear of a person raised passively in our current system. The him that might’ve existed in an individualist world might’ve been proactive and achieved a far better education. You simply can’t say either way, so it’s somewhat irrational to claim certainty of his particular conclusion. We therefore talk in moral terms over inductives.