Voluntarism and Governance in Education

Abstract

The fundamental characteristics of private and public education -voluntarism and government control-are described and related to authority, consensus and commitment in schools. The paper argues that private and public schools rely on different types of consensus and authority: value consensus and traditional authority in the private school, and political consensus and legal/rational authority in the public school. It points out the necessary connection between government and education in a modern nation, and suggests the present dilemma this connection creates for public schools. It suggests that the major difficulty with the public schools is a lack of commitment in the school community, and that such commitment will not be forthcoming until a general ideology of the place of education in the national agenda is accepted. Some implications of this analysis of the differences between public and private schools for assessing recent education policy recommendations are discussed.