Separation of School and StateEducation: Too Important To Be Delegated to Government

Terry McIntyre

Nov 18, 2013Karl Hess Clubkarlhessclub.org

Karl Hess, Autodidact

Karl Hess “loved education, which is why [he] spent as little time aspossible in schools.” He and his mother believed that public educationwas a waste of time. She taught him to read, showed him how to use thelibrary and how to access public records; and turned him loose; she’dwrite a note excusing his absence any day he wanted to spend at home orin the library reading, if he’d discuss what he’d read afterwards. He rarelyattended school, officially dropped out at age 15, and immediately wentto work for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a news-writer.

Nation At Risk - 1983

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose onAmerica the mediocre educational performance that existstoday, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As itstands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

Nation At Risk - 1983

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose onAmerica the mediocre educational performance that existstoday, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As itstands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

This royal ”we” refers not to ”an unfriendly foreign power” but to thefederal, state, and local governments which actually provide and controlmost education in America.

Nation At Risk - 1983

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose onAmerica the mediocre educational performance that existstoday, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As itstands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

This royal ”we” refers not to ”an unfriendly foreign power” but to thefederal, state, and local governments which actually provide and controlmost education in America. ”Ourselves” refers to you and me and ourchildren, all of us who are subject to these acts of government.

Nation At Risk - 1983

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose onAmerica the mediocre educational performance that existstoday, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As itstands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

This royal ”we” refers not to ”an unfriendly foreign power” but to thefederal, state, and local governments which actually provide and controlmost education in America. ”Ourselves” refers to you and me and ourchildren, all of us who are subject to these acts of government.

We, the Federal, state, and local governments, have imposed onthe children of America the mediocre educational performancewhich exists today.

How Mediocre Is It? Compared to what?

◮ The United States spends more per student than all others, butinternational tests place it only in the middle of the pack.

◮ Those nations and individuals who do better may actually benefitlargely from extra-governmental efforts by parents, efforts which areofficially deprecated and seldom studied.

◮ Historically, literacy rates and levels of competence in America havedeclined markedly.

◮ Home-educated students score, on average, at the 85th percentile.Compared to this, today’s schools are not even close to what theycould be.

◮ When compared to exceptional teachers (Sergio Juarez Correa, JohnTaylor Gatto, Jaime Escalante, Louis Benezet), most schools are justphoning it in. Many other hard-working teachers seem to be trappedin a system which works even harder in the opposite direction.

Are Our Measuring Sticks Dumbed-Down?

Sample questions from the tests used to measure educationalperformance are hardly rocket science:

John wants to put a fence around a rectangular garden 10 feet long and6 feet wide. Ignoring the need for a gate, how many feet of fencing areneeded? (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP])

◮ Of the 9 year olds who took this test, only 9% got the right answer.◮ Among the 13 year olds, 31% stumbled upon the correct answer.

◮ The most popular wrong answers were 16 and 60.

Are that many children innately incapable of simple math?

Juarez Sergio Correa’s class

Previously, 45% of the students in Correa’s class had failed the mathsection on Mexico’s national exam. Not one made it to the “Excellent”category in math. 31% had failed Spanish.

Juarez Sergio Correa’s class

Previously, 45% of the students in Correa’s class had failed the mathsection on Mexico’s national exam. Not one made it to the “Excellent”category in math. 31% had failed Spanish.

After spending a year with Correa, only 7% failed math, 63% were rated“Excellent” in math. Only 3.5% failed Spanish; even their lowestlanguage scores were well above the national average.Juarez Correa’s top math student, Paloma Noyola Bueno, had the highestscore in the entire nation. Ten of Correa’s students had math scores inthe 99.99th percentile. Three placed at the same high level in Spanish.

Juarez Sergio Correa’s class

Previously, 45% of the students in Correa’s class had failed the mathsection on Mexico’s national exam. Not one made it to the “Excellent”category in math. 31% had failed Spanish.

After spending a year with Correa, only 7% failed math, 63% were rated“Excellent” in math. Only 3.5% failed Spanish; even their lowestlanguage scores were well above the national average.Juarez Correa’s top math student, Paloma Noyola Bueno, had the highestscore in the entire nation. Ten of Correa’s students had math scores inthe 99.99th percentile. Three placed at the same high level in Spanish.

Francisco Sanchez Salazar, chief of the Regional Center of EducationalDevelopment in Matamoros: “The teaching method makes littledifference.”

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

The Method of Juarez Sergio Correa

Throw out the formal rules, plans, curriculum, procedures, and tests.Instead, ask interesting and challenging questions.

Step back, let the students do the thinking. Explain nothing until asked.Answer questions when asked.

Does this method work? Correa’s students didn’t just ace the nationalexams, they raced through, they reported that it was easy.

How does this method work? Children learn best when grappling withinteresting problems; Correa was working with their nature, not against it.

Schools Can’t Learn

◮ Larry Cuban, top educational researcher with decades of experience,surveyed more than 100 years of reform efforts in America, andconcluded that they were like tossing rocks into a deep pond —impressive initial splashes which quickly faded from view.

◮ From time to time, truly exceptional teachers — including Benezet,Escalante, Gatto, and Correa — buck the system and showoutstanding results, but the Departments of Education, far fromwelcoming such innovation, suppress it.

◮ The problems are deep, systemic, and worldwide. Bureaucraticinstitutions naturally have powerful tendencies to resist change. Onereason for this reluctance to change is economic; another is deeplypolitical.

Economic Calculation Problem

Socialist economies — Government ownership and control of the meansof production of goods and services — are like robots in old TV shows:Can not compute: insufficient data. Worse, this problem cannot befixed by throwing more people and money at it. The richly detailed andwidely distributed information needed to plan production and distributioncan only be discovered by entrepreneurs and consumers in a genuinelyfree market. It is inherently contextual, constantly changing, dependenton particulars of time, place, knowledge, incentives, and individual values.It is discovered as people make economic decisions based uponassessments of value and risk, which lead to voluntary exchanges. Thedata needed is not and cannot be collected in one place; it is distributedin millions of minds, which differ in important ways. These differences arean important part of the data, and cannot be abstracted or aggregatedaway, without losing information vital to the calculation of what peoplewant, and how to deliver it efficiently and effectively.

When central collectivist connivers try to “nudge” or “improve”outcomes via guaranteed funding, mandatory attendance, mandatedcurriculum, Common Core, and other regulations, they interfere with anddegrade this free flow and discovery of information. Some argue that it isuseful to introduce certain (political) information, but such politicalinformation is inferior to market information for many reasons, not leastof which is that the ends of politicians are often far from the ends ofindividual consumers.

So-called “public-private partnerships” can only imitate markets; theycan’t be markets. To be efficient and innovative and effective, to havethe right data to make good economic decisions, we must have voluntarychoices of what and how to produce; and of what to purchase, fromwhom, at what price.

Central Planners Need More Brains

Take away those voluntary choices, and you have something like Sovietstores in the former USSR in the 1970s - low quality goods and services,frequent shortages, combined with high costs of production. The entiresupply chain from raw materials to store was owned and operated by thegovernment. Stores and other institutions had little incentive to improve;they were almost never shut down for poor performance. In such a forcedeconomy, the planners do not have access to the widely distributedinformation implicit in freely-made choices. In an economic union of 293million smart and industrious people, the Soviets behaved as if a fewthousand planners could manage everything, even when operating blind –but economic decision-making cannot and should not be collectivized.

In the same way that the Soviets abolished farm collectivism, we shouldabolish educational collectivism; we should separate school and state.

Too Radical?

Is complete separation of school and state “too radical?”Would smaller steps — such as vouchers and tax credits and charterschools and local control — get the job done? No, absolutely not!

Such incremental efforts sidestep the question of whether centralplanning can work better or worse than voluntary exchange; worse, theytreat that question as if it were definitively settled in favor of politicalinterference with our lives. Minor details of that interference might betweaked, but not its fundamental nature. Your choices will be restrictedby the arbitrary diktats of central planners; the mutually-beneficialentrepreneurial process will be corrupted and degraded; the vitalinformation needed to make good decisions will be lost; the value andefficiency of education provided to you and yours will suffer, compared towhat you might otherwise have been free to choose.

A Deeper Question

What sort of society do we wish to live in? Do we want to live in a freecountry? When, exactly, should that freedom begin? At the magic age of18? Why not 81? Should teachers and parents and administrators alsoenjoy freedom? Should we not begin by making our fundamentalinstitutions, including schools, free–as–in–freedom? After twelve years ofcarefully regimented compulsory education, can we even imagine whatreal freedom would look like?

You might ask “are there any real-life models of schools which begin withfreedom as their organizing principle?”

Democratic Free Schools

There are about 40 Democratic Free Schools in the U.S. and U.K.Perhaps the oldest is Summerhill, a British school founded in 1921 on theradical premise that children should be free to decide what to learn, oreven whether to learn. While Sumerhill does have a schedule of classes inthe usual subjects, children are never required to attend.

Summerhill attracted some disruptive children who weren’t doing well inother schools. The founder, A.S. Neill, used to give these studentsprivate therapy sessions, but stopped when he discovered that freedomand a healthy variety of voluntary options were all the therapy needed.The children mend on their own. The rules at Summerhill are minimal,and are voted on equally by all, whether adult or child, in democraticassemblies.

Sudbury Schools

Sudbury Valley School was founded in America in 1968, on the principlethat “children are already extremely good at creativity, imagination,alertness, curiosity, thoughtfulness, responsibility and judgement. Whatchildren lack is experience, which they can gain if adults stay out of theway. All people are curious by nature; the most efficient, long-lasting,and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by thelearner; all people are creative if allowed to develop their unique talents;age-mixing among students promotes growth in all members of thegroup; freedom is essential to the development of personal responsibility.”(statements from their web site)

What if we free the teachers?

Home Schooling/Unschooling

About 1.5–2.5 million American children are taught at home by parentswho are far too many, too widely–dispersed, and too independent forbureaucrats to manage in detail. Left free to experiment, theseparent–teachers often discover that what works at home is nothing likethe schools we have grown accustomed to. Children do not need to beschooled for 6 or 8 hours per day. They do not need bells every 45minutes. Just about everything done in schools–as–we–know–them turnsout to be superfluous.

On average, home-schoolers test at the 85th percentile. Even those of“low socio-economic status” average at the 80th percentile. Homeschooling looks like that long-sought Great Equalizer of education.

For those who still go to regular schools, some of the best predictors ofsuccess have much to do with a home culture of education, which mayactually be responsible for more educational attainment than we realize— and which looks a lot like what home–schoolers do.

Elevators or Tar Pits?

Schools cannot eliminate the racial academic achievement gap becauseschools did not create it. This gap comes to schools with children fromtheir homes, families and communities. The gap, which is well-establishedbefore kindergarten, widens during the first three years of schooling.

Philip Jackson, Black Star Project, Chicago

One Mother’s Story

I studied his IEP, and saw no way for Jimmy to get off the short bus for“developmentally retarded” children and rejoin the others — so Imainstreamed him and worked with him in the evenings to bring him upto speed. Today, he’s a lawyer.

Private communication with Alice Sheets, Dean of Department ofEducation, CCAC.

What If We Free The Schools?

Not every parent is willing to home–school. Nor can all parents affordSudbury schools — it can be hard to come up with $4000 tuition out ofour own pockets, even if this is much cheaper than the “free”government schools. Is there any hope for them? To answer thatquestion, let us go abroad and look in places where governments arepoor, where government schools are much worse than ours, and wheregovernments do not have SWAT teams to back up their regulations andstifle innovation. In these places, an educational revolution has beensliding right under the radar: small, affordable, parent-fundedgovernment-free schools in huge, ever-growing numbers.

The Beautiful Tree - Top of Reading List

The Beautiful Tree

James Tooley was studying private educational alternatives in Hyderabad,India, and felt he was being steered toward the most expensive, eliteschools. But he was looking for a way to help the poor, not the elites.He asked if there were any private schools for the poor. Politicians andbureaucrats admitted that private schools existed for the middle class —their own children went to such schools — but as for the poor, it wasunthinkable. He found similar denials everywhere he went.

The Three Denials

It is widely believed by politicians and bureaucrats in India and all aroundthe world, that

◮ The poor can’t afford to educate their children

◮ The poor don’t care.

◮ The poor don’t know enough to evaluate the quality.

However, when tested in the real world, all three claims were false.

What Tooley Found: The Reality◮ Thousands of parent-funded, government-free schools, where some ofthe poorest people in the world pay about 10% of their income toeducate their children — who are 50-80% of students in some provinces.About 90% of these schools were run for profit, and provided 10-20% oftheir seats for free. The remaining 10% of schools were subsidizedcompletely or partially. Some few schools also accepted small portions ofgovernment aid.

◮ James Tooley, Pauline Dixon, and their researchers tested over 32,000students, and found that the results of private education were superior tocompeting government schools.

◮ Compelled by economic necessity, these numerous and highlycompetitive schools were deeply responsive to the needs of students andparents. Wherever children and tuition move freely, market choicesswiftly reward good schools and punish bad schools.

◮ Governments were oblivious. In one province, the government claimedthat only 60 private schools existed; Tooley’s team found over 1200.

◮ Since so many students went to non-government schools, the“cream-skimming” theory could be tested, and was found wanting.

Reclaiming Education

If we want education to be of the highest quality, inclusive of allchildren and all their varied needs, and to respond to the needs of societyand encourage life-long learning, then our current system simply cannotdeliver it. There is no point in looking any further to the State. Stateintervention in education has been a cul-de-sac, a historical experimentwith the lives of children.

- James Tooley, Reclaiming Education.

James Tooley began as a liberal who wanted “better” governmentschools. After decades of research, he concluded that inherently socialistinstitutions cannot be reformed; they must be abolished. Governmentownership and control of schools is, in short, a serious design flaw.

Market vs. Government

Andrew J. Coulson

Andrew J. Coulson, Cato Institute Fellow and author of MarketEducation: The Unknown History and many papers, including ameta–analysis: Comparing Public, Private, and Market Schools: TheInternational Evidence.

Across time, countries, and outcome measures, private provision ofeducation outshines public provision according to the overwhelmingmajority of econometric studies.

It is in fact the least regulated market school systems that show thegreatest margin of superiority over state schooling.

Solutions now considered in the U.S.A. — vouchers, charter schools, andtax credits — are already common in several Western nations, and haveled to increased regulation of private schools, due to the competinginterests of school unions, and a rather limited degree of improvement ingovernment schools, due largely to the need to compete with privateschools. Freedom for our schools, teachers, and students would be muchbetter.

Market Education: Historical Norm

The demand for mass education arose when people were no longerscratching bare subsistence from the soil, and had leisure time.Governments first resisted mass education — the Stamp Act wasdesigned to increase the cost of printing books, pamphlets, and papers.Nevertheless, demand for education kept rising. When it became toogreat to stifle, governments began to co-opt the process.

Prior to the first compulsory attendance laws (1850), Alexis de Toqueville(author of Democracy in America) and other contemporary travelers wereastonished by the world–class quality and quantity of education inAmerica. Perhaps such travelers interacted only with wealthy elites?Publishing statistics for James Fenimore Cooper, Noah Webster, andNathaniel Hawthorne belie this theory; J.K. Rowlings would cut off herright arm to have such deep market penetration.

Of note is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s occupations: Editor of theAmerican Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge.

History: Less is More

When studying mass education in early America and Britain, manypeople look for evidence of students sitting at desks for twelve thousandhours in isolated, regulation–bound cloisters. But today’s modernconventions exist purely for political reasons. Time spent warming seatsis not an adequate measure of quality of learning.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin describes his own education:two years of formal classes, one in grammar school, one to learn“ciphering” (arithmetic). He did poorly at ciphering, dropped out ofschool, and went to work at the age of 12. Franklin and his friends wereautodidacts; they taught themselves fluency in writing, computation,foreign languages, and many other things. Franklin became a printer,writer, publisher, editor, inventor, scientist, and Ambassador to France.His drive and attainments were exceptional, but his methods were not.

Education in the United States, a Documentary History.

That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair ofstate is not to be denied, but what should be the character of this publiceducation, and how young persons should be educated, are questionswhich remain to be considered. As things are, there is disagreementabout the subjects. For mankind are by no means agreed about thethings to be taught, whether we look to virtue or the best life. Neither isit clear whether education is more concerned with intellectual or withmoral virtue.The existing practice is perplexing; no one knows on whatprinciple we should proceed - should the useful in life, or should virtue, orshould the higher knowledge, be the aim of our training? . . . Again,about the means there is no agreement; for different persons, startingwith different ideas about the nature of virtue, naturally disagree aboutthe practice of it.

— Aristotle, Politics

Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII

- What is Not Said

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention aboveall to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm tothe constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form ofgovernment under which he lives. For each government has a peculiarcharacter which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. Thecharacter of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchycreates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better thegovernment.

And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that educationshould be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and notprivate — not as at present, when every one looks after his own

children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort

which he thinks best; the training in things which are of commoninterest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that anyone of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state,and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part isinseparable from the care of the whole.[emphasis added]

Utopian Vision vs. Practical Reality

Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers known to the world, was nottaught in schools of the sort which he claimed it “is not to be denied”and “no one will doubt,” would be right for the world. He was describinga utopian ideal, perhaps telling his employer, Phillip of Macedonia, whathe wanted to hear.

2400 years later, passages like these are stripped of context and fed toteachers as if they were indubitably true.

Schools in Athens were free–wheeling discussion groups, not the rigidlyprogrammed and structured cloisters of today. In fact, the Greek wordσκηολ; meant “leisure; free time; that in which leisure time is spent,especially lecture, disputation, discussion; philosophy”

Athenian Regulation of Education

Schools shall open late enough, and close early enough, that studentsmay travel during daylight hours.

That’s it. One regulation imposed by the Athenian government.

For its five–hundred-year history from Homer to Aristotle, Atheniancivilization was a miracle in a rude world; teachers flourished there butnone were grounded in fixed buildings with regular curricula under thethumb of an intricately layered bureaucracy. There were no schools inHellas. For the Greeks, study was its own reward.

— John Taylor Gatto

Beware the Context — Cui Bono?

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they aredealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is “doing his English prep” andhas no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is nota theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten yearshence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will conditionhim to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as acontroversy at all.

— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943

Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language,and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, therewill be a considerable variation in different schools; the parents mustjudge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered . .. Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the “supremacy of thestate” as a compulsory philosophy.

But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate thedoctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the “divine rightof kings”, or the “will of the people” in “democracy.” Once that doctrinehas been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break thestranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has hadhis body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopuswould sooner release its prey.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete modelof the totalitarian state.

— Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943

The aim of the Prussian Model of Education

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it issimply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, tobreed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality.That is its aim in the United States, whatever pretensions of politicians,pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

If any contrary theory is cherished among us it is simply because publicschools are still new in America, and so their true character and purposeare but little understood. The notion that they were invented byAmerican patriotism and ingenuity, and go back, in fact, to the first daysof the New England Puritans — this notion is, of course, only hollownonsense.

-H.L. Mencken, Review of Upton Sinclair’s The Goslings, in AmericanMercury, 1924http://www.ralphmag.org/menckenI.html

After thirty years teaching in both “good” and “bad” schools in NYC,John Taylor Gatto had a deep sense that the school system was workingagainst all efforts to provide real education. He wrote that

schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprisesof the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained inscience classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes.The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obeyorders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane,caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators,but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individualcontributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard,the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell andthe young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebookand move to a different cell . . .

Gatto wrote several books to explore why schools and teachers —teachers who want to do well — seem to be working at cross–purposes.He went back to the sources:

In 1520, Martin Luther sought to revive Aristotle’s ideal, with a twist —to conscript the young in a war with the Devil.

If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military serviceto bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martialduties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the peopleto send their children to school, because in this case we are warring withthe devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities andprincipalities of strong men.

In this unholy alliance, Martin Luther sought the aid of earthlyStates in a spiritual war, in exchange for teaching compliance to the State.

Martin Luther thought one hour per day would be sufficient to educatechildren in the essentials: reading, the Bible, and civics. Once initiated,people were expected to take charge of their own education.

Researchers E.G. West and Andrew J. Coulson found that education inAmerica and the United Kingdom was voluntary and widespread up untillate in the 19th century. Compulsory attendance was demanded indifferent times in different states, starting in 1850 in Massachusetts, andculminating about 1910 in others. School reformers discovered thatchildren would tolerate only so much preaching and blather and “reform”before they’d go back to their own endeavors.

2000 years after Aristotle’s observations, people still had divergent Ideasabout education. In England, there was a strong tradition of individualliberty; education grew from the bottom-up, provided by parents,churches, and independent ”private venture” secular schools. Parentsusually started the process, but could also delegate, just as today’sparents might hire a ballet class or karate class. From an early age,individuals were expected to take responsibility for their own education.On most of the Continent, education tended to flow from the Statedownward, an instrument used to shape the people. In America, thistension between competing ideas persisted at both local and larger scales.

“Father of Education” in North Carolina

The state, in the warmth of her solicitude for their welfare, must takecharge of these children, and place them in school where their minds canbe enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue.

In these schools the precepts of morality and religion shall be inculcated,and habits of subordination and obedience will be formed.

— Archibald D. Murphey, 1816

When did parents become superfluous? Did I not get the memo? Whowill decide these precepts and virtues? Note the “habits of subordinationand obedience” to the State — a common theme among advocates forgovernment schools.

Historically, enlightenment comes during periods when neither State norChurch could (or would) limit educational innovation.

Murphey, Regarding Discipline and Subordination

The amusements of youth may also be made auxiliary to the exactnessof discipline. All students should be taught the manual exercise, militaryevolutions and manoeuvres, should be under a standing organization as amilitary corps, and with proper officers to train and command them.There can be no doubt, that much may be done in this way towardsenforcing habits of subordination and strict discipline — it will be theprovince of the Board of Public Instruction, who have the generalsuperintending care of all the Literary Institutions of the State, to devisefor them systems of discipline and government; and your committee hopethey will discharge their duty with fidelity.

The Prussian System Comes To America

If a regard to the public safety makes it right for a government tocompel the citizens to do military duty when the country is invaded, thesame reason authorizes the government to compel them to provide forthe education of their children — for no foes are so much to be dreadedas ignorance and vice. A man has no more right to endanger the state bythrowing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children, than he has togive admission to spies of an invading army. If he is unable to educate hischildren the state should assist him — if unwilling, it should compel him.

Calvin E. Stowe, The Prussian System of Public Instruction and itsApplicability to the United States (Cincinnati, 1830)

Contrast with Thomas Jefferson

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let hischild be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by theforcible transportation and education of the [child] against the will of hisfather.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth canstand by itself.

School as Church

When calls to military ardor are insufficient, there’s always the religion ofStatheism:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for themaintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the rightsocial growth. In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the trueGod and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

— John Dewey, Pedagogic Creed, 1897

Perhaps this was the inspiration for “One school to rule them all, oneschool to find them, one school to bring them all and in the darknessbind them.” — which JRR Tolkien didn’t quite say.

The Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, Reloaded

Thomas Jefferson was justly pleased with the Virginia Act for ReligiousFreedom. A brief summary of the main points:

◮ Our minds should be free.

◮ It is wrong to force us to pay for the propagation of ideas with which wedisagree.

◮ Those who presume to rule and to govern the contents of our minds, donot have superior knowledge. Their coercive efforts deprive us of betteralternatives, and also deprive teachers of the benefit of our freely-madechoices.

◮ Truth itself is strong enough to defend against error

Don’t these same principles apply to schools just as much as to churches?

Don’t need (much) Education if you teach yourself

Samuel Blumenfeld researched the 117 men who signed the Declarationof Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, anddiscovered one out of three had had only a few weeks of formalschooling, and only one in four went to college.Even the elites seldom spent 4 years in college. Thomas Jefferson, one ofthe most learned men in America, went to William and Mary for only twoyears. Those who did go to college usually started at 16 or even 13 yearsof age. Who starts college that early today? Only our homeschoolers.

One did not have to be a member of the elite to be well-educated.Benjamin Franklin was one of 13 children; his father was a candlemaker,a poor but highly-regarded man. Benjamin had 2 years of formalschooling; after this, he taught himself, often in study groups withfriends. He became a highly respected publisher, writer, inventor,scientist, and ambassador. Self-education was expected and widelypracticed by every American.

Summary

Government departments of education cannot calculate what peoplewant, nor how to deliver it effectively and efficiently. Reform efforts failfor deep institutional reasons, which include a deep conflict of interest.Cui Bono? Who benefits? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watchesthe watchers? Why are the very people who vote for politicians andpolicies actually taught so little that is useful about politics, history, andeconomics?High rates of dropping out, home-education, and supplementaryeducation are indicators that government schools are not satisfying theneeds of students, who may be correct in perceiving such schools asmajor impediments to learning. Many high school graduates areunprepared for college, and colleges themselves have been dumbed down.Top-down educational collectives neglect, marginalize, misuse, and abusemillions of intelligent, creative brains — the brains of students, teachers,parents, and administrators.

Liberate our children from the game.

“The only way to win the game is not to play the game” —War GamesIt is time to withdraw, to liberate our schools and the minds of ourchildren from the State.