Slow news day here at the Bacon’s Rebellion bunker and command center, so I thought I would indulge in a little outside-the-box thinking. I have extracted the following post from an unpublished (and probably unpublishable) novel, “Dust Mites,” which is set on the Moon in the year 2075. American colonies on the moon are getting restive under the oppressive rule of a distant, corrupt and out-of-touch United States. The novel is mainly an action thriller but each chapter is prefaced by a vignette describing various aspects of life and political economy on the moon.

Writing the novel gave me the opportunity to ask: If lunar colonies had the opportunity to reinvent core institutions from fresh, what might they look like? How would they organize their systems of governance, education, health care, and public safety, etc.? In the following vignette, fashioned as a policy paper drafted by a future American Enterprise Institute, I explore how educational institutions might evolve in Galileo Station, a libertarian lunar colony.

American Enterprise Institute
Policy Paper

Executive Summary: As President Chou intensifies her campaign to bring the lunar territories to heel, supporters of the administration have made an issue of the colonies’ meager investment in public education. Galileo Station, in particular, has been depicted as a free rider that soaks up human capital developed on Earth, benefiting from the investments that the United States makes in schools while expending few resources of its own.

This view is based upon a profound misunderstanding of the nature of education in Galileo Station. It assumes that without government schools, there is no education. In truth, Galiletians have reinvented education as a private-sector system that is far more responsive to consumer demand, delivers higher levels of student achievement and is less expensive than Earth-bound systems where the interests of politicians, teachers unions and educational bureaucrats prevail over those of students. As such, it stands as a rebuke — and an ideological threat — to government-dominated education.

The early settlers of Galileo Station had few children to be educated and the primitive colonial government saw no need to erect a school system. Pioneer parents borrowed from the home schooling movement on Earth, which they supplemented with online course instruction. In time, as the population grew and the number of school-aged children increased, free-lance instructors began offering their services. Since then, the educational marketplace has evolved to a point where parents can choose between a wide selection of private tutors, home schooling collectives, free-lance teachers running single classrooms, teachers cooperatives and private academies organized much like earthside private schools. Educators compete for market share by providing the best educational value based on price and quality.

There is no one-size-fits-all education in Galileo Station. Galiletians have dispensed with the assumption that children must move in lock-step through twelve grades with their chronological peers, learning the same material at the same time. Children master bodies of knowledge when they are ready to, and advance at the pace at which they are capable. Galiletians also have disproved the assumption that education must take place in institutions called “schools” or that education necessarily entails vast expenditures on elaborate facilities, school administrations and redundant municipal, state and federal bureaucracies. Although some traditionally organized schools do exist, 72 percent of all parents hire teachers directly, cutting out the middlemen.

Galiletian teachers teach 17.4 students on average, a teacher-pupil ratio comparable to that of earthside schools. Charging an average tuition of $6,200 per student, teachers net $84,000 a year on average after expenses — comparable to the salary and benefits earned by United States teachers with seniority. Yet Galiletians spend less than half per student that Americans do, and students score significantly higher on international standardized tests. Educational testing and teacher performance measures are administered by the Galileo Station Educators’ Association. Government plays no meaningful role in what is widely considered to be a consumer decision.