Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market in Education

Jerry Kirkpatrick's Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market in Education presents a provocative synthesis of the educational philosophies of Maria Montessori and John Dewey with the economic philosophies of Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises. At the center of Kirkpatrick's thesis is his belief that public education be subject to a free-market model. Kirkpatrick holds that students can thrive in an educational system free from all forms of coercion, something he believes can only be accomplished in a free-market educational system that is not bound by government intervention. He borrows from Ayn Rand in arguing that only the individual matters and that all forms of imposed authority, including compulsory, state-run education, need to be abolished. Kirkpatrick's substitution for an education system administered by states and municipalities is an education system that is privatized and subject to the free market.

Throughout the book, Kirkpatrick promotes a competitive, free-market education system that prepares students for future life by altering many of the foundations of modern U.S. education. He looks to Dewey to support his argument that students should be educated without coercion, borrowing from Dewey's notion that each student's education be driven by his or her interests and experience. In this sense, Kirkpatrick's reading of Dewey is accurate. However, in arguing for competition and privatization in education, Kirkpatrick misappropriates several of Dewey's key theories, including Dewey's disdain for finite ends separated from means and overly vocationalistic training for "future life." Kirkpatrick also appears to eschew Dewey's belief in schools as democratic social institutions.

In keeping with his free-market model for education, Kirkpatrick sees education as preparation for a career within a capitalist system. Kirkpatrick contends throughout his book that the ultimate goal for education is for young people to find a "productive career" (25). Kirkpatrick argues,

To instill in the young a purpose in life is the fundamental aim of education. Purpose in life is defined by one's chosen values, especially career … at the end of formal schooling, the young adult should be fully equipped with the knowledge, values, skills—and confident determination—required to pursue a productive career.

(110)

Kirkpatrick's model is overtly careerist and is contrary to much of what Dewey not only argued for but also demonstrated in his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. In Kirkpatrick's educational system, knowledge and ideas are for sale, students and their families "get" the education they can pay for, and education has narrowly defined ends separated from means. Those ends center on students finding a productive career. Kirkpatrick has missed a key idea in Dewey's educational philosophy, that is, the idea that education does not have predetermined ends:

The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above.¹

Dewey not only argued against imposed ends in education, he also opposed the notion that education is preparation for a future life.

Kirkpatrick's argument for free-market education is based in his belief that a business model can be applied to the nation's public school systems. He believes that the privatization of education will lead to the innovation and experimentation that Dewey and Montessori espoused. Writes Kirkpatrick, "The deregulation and privatization of education would open a new era of experimentation, not unlike the experimentation that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (179).

Regarding who will pay for education in this model, Kirkpatrick evokes a version of social Darwinism for schools whereby students and their families would receive that for which they can pay. He argues, "Education...