School Types

School types are the institutional forms through which a society educates its children: district public schools, charter and academy schools, independent fee-paying schools, religious and parochial schools, grammar and selective schools, magnet and vocational schools, and home education. The mix differs by country, but the question behind the taxonomy is the same everywhere — who decides what a child is taught, and on what authority.

Conservatives answer that the authority belongs first to parents, and that the state’s role is to guarantee that education happens rather than to monopolise its supply. A plural system of schools follows from that premise. A single state model, uniform in curriculum and staffed by a single professional body, does not.

Key Takeaways

• The main forms are state-run district schools, publicly funded but independently operated schools (charters in the United States, academies in England), private and religious schools, selective schools, and home education.
• Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education” separated the funding of schooling from its provision, and supplied the argument for vouchers and for every later school-choice programme.
• Home education has grown from a legally contested practice in the 1970s to a recognised option across the anglosphere, with the federal National Center for Education Statistics recording 5.2 per cent of American school-age children taught at home in 2022-23, up from about 3 per cent before the 2020-21 school closures.
• Conservatives treat institutional plurality as a check on the state, on the analogy of a free press: many schools make a captured curriculum harder to impose.
• Critics argue that choice sorts children by the resources of their parents and drains the schools that serve those with the fewest options.

History And Context

Universal state schooling is recent. Prussia made attendance compulsory in stages from 1763, and the model spread through nineteenth-century Europe and America. In England the 1870 Elementary Education Act created board schools alongside the existing church schools rather than replacing them, and the resulting dual system of voluntary-aided and maintained schools survives. Massachusetts passed the first American compulsory attendance law in 1852; the last state, Mississippi, did so in 1918.

The settlement was contested from the outset over religion. American Catholics built a parallel parochial system in the nineteenth century because the common schools taught a Protestant curriculum. Oregon tried to close that system in 1922 by requiring attendance at public schools; in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) the Supreme Court struck the law down, holding that a child is not the mere creature of the state. That decision is the legal foundation of school plurality in the United States.

Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay proposed that the state fund education without producing it, issuing parents a voucher redeemable at the school of their choice.¹ Its practical career began in Milwaukee in 1990 with the first modern American voucher programme, and continued through the charter school movement — Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1991 — and through the English academies programme, announced by Tony Blair’s government in March 2000, with the first three academies opening in September 2002 and the model extended sharply after the 2010 Academies Act, which moved most English secondary schools out of local-authority control.

Selective schooling took the opposite path in Britain. The 1944 Education Act built a tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools with entry set by the eleven-plus examination; from 1965 most local authorities replaced it with comprehensives, and the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act barred new selective schools. Some 163 grammar schools remain in England.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives ground the case in the family. The parent, not the ministry, holds primary responsibility for a child’s formation, and schools act as delegates of that responsibility rather than as substitutes for it. Both the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, at article 26, and the American constitutional line running from Pierce place the prior right to choose with parents. A plural system is the institutional expression of that right.

The second argument is about power. Roger Scruton held that a school transmits an inheritance — a language, a canon, a set of loyalties — and that a state which monopolises schools acquires the power to edit the inheritance at will.² Many kinds of school make that edit harder to execute, in the way many newspapers make a controlled press harder to achieve.

The third argument concerns performance. Where money follows the child, schools face consequences for failure that a guaranteed catchment removes. The evidence is mixed rather than one-sided: American charter results vary enormously by sector and city, with Stanford’s CREDO studies finding urban charter networks outperforming district comparators while stand-alone charters in some states lag. Conservatives read the variance as an argument for allowing forms to compete rather than for prescribing one.

Thomas Sowell’s study of American charter schools argued that the strongest results come from schools permitted to set their own discipline, hiring and curriculum, and that regulatory parity with district schools erases the advantage.³ The conservative conclusion is that plurality is worth having because nobody knows in advance which form works for which child.

Differing Positions

The main objection is stratification. Selective and independent schools concentrate advantage: in England roughly 6 to 7 per cent of pupils attend private schools, and their alumni hold a share of senior positions in law, politics, and the media far above that. Grammar school entry correlates strongly with household income and with paid tutoring. On this argument a plural system reproduces the class structure it claims to open.

The second objection is fiscal. Vouchers and charters move funding out of district schools whose fixed costs — buildings, heating, transport — do not fall in proportion, so the children who remain are taught with less. Teacher unions add that the schools admitting by choice can decline the pupils who cost most to teach.

A third position holds that a common school serves a civic purpose no plural system delivers: children of different classes and creeds learning in one room acquire a shared citizenship. This was Horace Mann’s argument in Massachusetts in the 1840s, and it is not a socialist one.⁴

Conservatives answer the first two points by distinguishing selection by ability from selection by fee, and by noting that catchment-area assignment prices schooling through house prices rather than tuition. To the third they answer that a common civic formation is a proper aim, and that a state which fails to deliver it in its own schools has no claim to forbid the alternatives.

References

1. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest (Rutgers University Press, 1955).
2. Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury, 2014).
3. Thomas Sowell, Charter Schools and Their Enemies (Basic Books, 2020).
4. Horace Mann, Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (Boston, 1848).