Watch the video above for the full discussion, but the core argument is one worth sitting with on its own.
A private business that stops delivering what people actually want finds out quickly. Sales drop, losses mount, and eventually the business closes. That threat of failure isn’t a flaw in the system — it’s the mechanism that forces correction. Nobody has to vote to shut down a failing company. The losses do it automatically.
Public education doesn’t have that mechanism. It runs on what’s described in the discussion as an almost inexhaustible supply of taxpayer money, regardless of whether students are actually learning to think, being given a real foundation of history and knowledge, or being allowed to express views that don’t match the prevailing line in the classroom.
Subscribe now and get 50% off a full year of Deskooled.
What happens to an institution that never has to answer for failing the people it’s supposed to serve?
It keeps doing whatever it’s already doing, indefinitely, because nothing built into the system forces a change.
This isn’t just an abstract argument. The discussion includes a specific example that makes it concrete: a private school charging $65,000 a year shut down a student who tried to offer a different perspective during a classroom discussion of a controversial police shooting. When a parent pushed back and asked why the school wasn’t presenting both sides, the answer given wasn’t about curriculum standards or academic rigor. It was that the school didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable.
That’s a remarkable thing to hear from an institution charging tuition at that level.
Classrooms exist to challenge students, not to shield them from ideas that complicate a simple narrative. A school that treats discomfort itself as the problem has quietly redefined its own purpose — and there’s no mechanism forcing it to notice, because the tuition checks keep clearing either way.
What would have to happen for a school like that to actually change?
Based on the argument laid out in the discussion, probably nothing internal. The correction, if it comes at all, has to come from parents and students choosing to leave — the closest thing education has to the loss that forces a business to fix what’s broken. Until enough people make that choice, the institution has no reason to.
Watch the full video above for more on why this gap between business and education matters more than it might seem.
Subscribe now and get 50% off a full year of Deskooled.
