Dear snarks_when_bored,
I think that your criticism of Hoppe has some validity, although Hoppe acknowledges that the provision of education extends beyond the family. But Hoppe is right that in the natural order, the state has nothing to do with it.
Hoppe allows for involvement of entities outside the family when he says, "produced and distributed in cooperative arrangements within the framework of the market economy."
Where I think your criticism is valid is that Hoppe restricts the extra-familial involvement in education too narrowly, at least as I read it.
As a homeschooler, I can tell you that Hoppe has outlined approximately how we operate. Education is entirely our responsibility. And, we do engage in cooperative arrangements to further the education of our children. We buy a private curriculum, we buy other educational enhancements from other private and semi-private offerors.
But the language Hoppe uses seems to miss an important feature of our experience, which is the cooperative arrangements that are not really oriented toward the market economy. We do a lot of things with other homeschooling families that are not really "commercial" or "market-based" in conception, motivation, or practical application. I guess if you want to draw the definition of "markets" broadly enough, you could possibly include all these other activities, but to me, that's a mindless reductionism.
Many of the cooperative arrangements in which we homeschoolers participate are based on bonds of friendship, social cooperation, fraternal sentiment, religious identity, caring for one another, altruism, and principled morality. I think that they are not well-described by "the framework of the market economy."
sitetest