In my libertarian opinion, the competition start when the participants can make an informed choice - ie when they have a basic education.
Basic education, teaching everyone to read and count, provides positive externalities too- so it's generally regarded as a good thing, and many government provide public basic education. (some push that even further, but let's not talk about that yet)
An alternative is having companies providing basic education, and students enrolling with vouchers - ie opening competition on the education service market while fixing demand, to keep the positive externality. It is even better than the former option.
But biasing the competition even before it is started, by having a single government-run education scheme, where bribery and cronyism replace healthy competition is so wrong!
A true libertarian must pay for all education. Vouchers? Vouchers are socialism. Pay in cash or whatever arrangements are mutually acceptable to both sides. The government's only acceptable role is to guarantee the execution of contracts. The market will guarantee efficiency!
I agree with everything but your first phrase - a 5 years old kids can't pay for his education and can't enter in a legally binding contract. This breaks that line of thought.
Is that a collectivist troll?
In that event, let me warm your heart: your reasoning hold perfectly well if you replace education by healthcare.
e.g. subtitles on movies, following instructions on computer games, googling stuff, reading books with parent (and looking again later without parent).
The general case is: pursuing something cool for its own sake is enhanced by learning language and other gateway knowledge i.e. knowledge which aids wider learning. No teaching or curriculum or testing or extrinsic motivation is required. Help is available. I'm not advocating neglect.
And there are the additional benefits of saving vast amounts of time and not damaging creativity.
Reading seems like one of those areas where being taught is far more efficient than figuring out for ones self, and even being taught is difficult.
We could argue about the way in which we teach it, in which case I generally agree that our current model is far to extrinsic. In the particular case of reading, I am not sure how to avoid it, as (with my limited knowledge of neruology) I believe there is a massive advantage to learning the skill early in your brains development, so we would want to learn it before we nessasarily have the reasoning skills to know why we need to spends so much time learning it.
In my libertarian opinion, the competition start when the participants can make an informed choice - ie when they have a basic education.
Basic education, teaching everyone to read and count, provides positive externalities too- so it's generally regarded as a good thing, and many government provide public basic education. (some push that even further, but let's not talk about that yet)
An alternative is having companies providing basic education, and students enrolling with vouchers - ie opening competition on the education service market while fixing demand, to keep the positive externality. It is even better than the former option.
But biasing the competition even before it is started, by having a single government-run education scheme, where bribery and cronyism replace healthy competition is so wrong!