Separating School & State: How To Liberate American Families by Sheldon Richman

Introduction:

The continuing crisis in public education in America has reached a critical point. After decades of argument, debate, and experimentation, it has become increasingly clear that reform programs and refinancing gimmickry will not fundamentally improve the system. Radical change - not Band-Aid solutions - is the only procedure that will save American education.

Why has public schooling reached this stage of deterioration and level of disappointment in the eyes of practically everyone? The reason is one that most Americans feel uncomfortable admitting: the public school system has failed because it is a system of socialist education. And, as a result, it has manifested all the symptoms and consequences that have usually been observed in all other examples of socialist enterprises.

Having a near-monopoly control over the supply of educational services in the United States, those who manage and work in the public schools have lost all attention to the needs of the consuming public. Indeed, parents often appear to be unavoidable nuisances who interfere in the teachers' and administrators' belief that they know better than the consuming public the educational product parents and children should want. Parents, it is true, can opt out of the system, but only if they are willing and able to pay a double tuition - one in the form of compulsory taxation for the educational product they do not want, and the other in the form of a voluntary fee for the private educational services they actually want their children to have. It is that high cost of private educational alternatives that enables the public educational establishment to be insensitive to the wishes of parents and children; and since taxes are paid whether or not the parents and children choose to leave the public school system, there is none of the negative financial feedback that exists in a free market to inform the supplier that he had better improve the quality of his product if he is not to run the risk of going under.

Furthermore, as a state-enforced monopoly, there is no way to discover whether the amount and the types of education supplied by the public school system are the ones that people actually want. In any normal market, the varieties of any product offered reflect the tastes and preferences of the buying public, and the qualities and characteristics of the product change over time as a response to any modification in the wants and desires of the consumers purchasing the product offered for sale. But with public schooling's being a state-enforced monopoly, new suppliers of educational services cannot freely and easily enter the market to offer something closer to what parents are looking for in terms of course-curriculum and school facilities. It is not surprising, therefore, that so many parents and students view the public school experience as a frustrating failure. Without a real, private competitive market for education in America, all that is available is what the state education central planners choose to provide.

And what is it that the state educational establishment force-feeds the school-age population? While it may, again, make many Americans uncomfortable to admit it, what the public school system imposes is an official and, many times, informal political and cultural ideology. As Sheldon Richman documents with great care in this book, modern, universal compulsory education has its origin in the 19th-century Prussian idea that it is the duty and responsibility of the state to indoctrinate each new generation of children into being good, obedient subjects who will be loyal and subservient to political authority and to the legitimacy of the political order. Young minds are to be filled with a certain set of ideas that reflect the vision of the official state educators concerning "proper behavior" and "good citizenship."

Over the generations, the content of what proper behavior and good citizenship means has changed, with changes in prevailing political and cultural currents in America, but the fact remains that the essence of the system was designed with that purpose in mind, and still operates on that basis. The parent has been viewed - and still is viewer - as a backward and harmful influence in the formative years of the child's upbringing, an influence that must be corrected for and replaced by the "enlightened" professional teacher who has been trained, appointed, and funded by the state. The public school, therefore, is a "reeducation camp" in which the child is to be remade in the proper "politically correct" image.

In the 20th century, the importance of government-controlled education was understood and exploited to the greatest degree by the totalitarian states. Through the vehicles of mandatory attendance and monopoly control over curriculum, the totalitarian states saw public schools as the means to mold the population into a harmonious collective will obedient to the dictates of those possessing absolute political authority. It was not sufficient for the great dictators of our century to have their commands obeyed under the threat of force; their ultimate goal was to control the minds of the population, and, through that method, obtain voluntary obedience from the masses over whom they ruled.

By controlling the education process, the totalitarians argued, they could manipulate the knowledge possessed and the ideas believed in by the population as a whole. Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in 1918, at a congress of Party education workers, it was stated:

We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.

Education for us is a vital public concern and is directed toward the strengthening of the socialist state.... We must develop in [every child] a feeling of pride in the most revolutionary class, the working class, and in its vanguard, the Communist Party. ... We must tell [every child] how the great people of our epoch - Lenin, Stalin, and their companions in arms - organized the workers in the struggle for a new and happy life. Our youth must be trained in militant readiness for the defense of their socialist fatherland.... The entire work of the school must be directed toward the education of children in communist morality. In giving knowledge to pupils and in formulating their work outlook, the school must cultivate in them habits of communist conduct.... Our task in the school is not merely the education of individual children, but also and especially the education of a collective and the education of each child in the spirit of collectivism.... Pupils must come to know that in our Soviet country the interests of the people are inseparable from the interests of their government.... And the natural attachment to the native country is strengthened by pride in one's socialist Motherland, in the Bolshevik Party, in the leader of the workers of the entire world - Comrade Stalin.... A conscious state of discipline is an organic part of communist morality, it is cultivated throughout the program of communist education. ... Submission to the will of the leader is a necessary and essential mark of discipline.... If an order is given, it must be carried out absolutely.

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which the individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in relation to the State.... It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

To all the effective possibility of enrolling in school and following a course of study, but to each one the duty of fulfilling his scholastic obligation in the interest of the State, that is, according to his truest aptitudes, committing all his faculties and his entire responsibility in such a way that the schools may be the reserve from which the State continually draws all the fresh energy it needs and not simply the agency in which thoughtless bourgeois vanity looks for seals and diplomas for its sterile ambitions.

In 1937, after spending almost a year and a half living under and studying the new order in Nazi Germany, Australian historian Stephen H. Roberts published a book entitled, The House That Hitler Built. This is his description of public education under National Socialism:

The Nazis have laid a heavy hand on education. They know that the textbooks of to-day are shaping the political realities of the decades to come, and accordingly have made every part of education - curiously enough, even mathematics - a training ground in Nazi ideology. As soon as the child enters an elementary school (Grundschule) at the age of six, his days are given over to the idealizing of the Nazis. He counts up storm troopers, he sews crude figures of Black Guards, he is told fairy tales of the Nazi knights, who saved the civilized maiden from the bad Russian gnomes, he makes flags and swastikas. After four years of this, he emerges to the Volksschule or Mittelschule, thinking of Hitler and his cabinet in the way we regard Christ and His disciples.... All world-history since the [first world] war has meaning only as bearing on the rise of Hitler; no other fact in the world counts as much as the new-found regeneration of the nation and the rise of the Fuhrer .

Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils in ... the importance of race and heredity for the life and destiny of the German people, and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward "the community of the nation". and the will consciously to cooperate in the racial purification of the German stock. Racial instruction is to begin with the youngest pupils (six years of age) in accordance with the desire of the Fuhrer "that no boy or girl should leave school without complete knowledge of the necessity and meaning of blood purity." The race idea leads to the rejection of democracy and other "equalizing tendencies". . . and strengthens understanding of the "leadership idea.

We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America, past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn-of-the-century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an
occasional world policeman.

Sometimes the historical myths and ideological premises change. Thirty years ago, children were still taught in public schools that Christopher Columbus's voyage was the culmination of the Age of Discovery, with his landing in the Americas and the opening up of new continents for settlement and civilization; now, Columbus is portrayed as the opening stage for a reign of mass murders and the extinction of the noble Indian tribes of America. Half a century ago, the industrialization of America was taught to be seen as the engine for progress and prosperity; today, millions of children in every public school in America are taught that industrialization has produced a squandering of the resources of the earth and threatens every living thing from the sea otter to the spotted owl. Thirty years ago, the "civic virtues" taught in public schools included the impropriety of premarital sex; today, those "civic virtues" have changed to include public school instruction in the proper use of prophylactics and the birth-control pill.

What is important is not merely the truth or validity of each of these facts, interpretations, or civic virtues. What is crucial is that they cumulatively represent the "court history" and "politically correct" views that rationalize and justify a particular cultural ideology and a set of government policies and powers over the society. They represent the official "Party line" of contemporary American politics and culture that is taught in every public school. They legitimize the existing order of things and the particular political agenda of those who control the monopoly system of compulsory education. Whether we like to admit it or not, its function is essentially the same as it was in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.

If parents are to be restored to their proper status as the guardians and primary educators of the young - if schooling is to be made responsive to the wants and needs of parents and children - if the American mind is to be opened to real diversity and pluralism education is to be made into an actual creative learning process - then the educational system must be completely taken out of the hands of the state. Education must be comprehensively privatized, freed from all forms of government regulation and control. Education must no longer be allowed to be a vehicle for the ends of the state. It must be transformed into one of the means for individual development and self-improvement.

In Separating School and State, Sheldon Richman effectively and comprehensively analyzes the failures of public schooling in America and explains the ideas and ideology behind the case for compulsory education. But beyond a historical interpretation and a critical evaluation of the state of public education in America today, Mr. Richman offers a vision of what a fully privatized educational system might look like - and in what ways it would solve many, if not most, of the problems that parents, students, and even a sizable number of professional educators see as the fundamental shortcomings of the present system. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mr. Richman's book may very well move the entire debate over education in America to a higher and more fruitful level of discussion.

The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded five years ago to defend the principles of the free society and the institutions of a truly free market. But freedom, if it is to be fully restored and preserved in America, requires that the marketplace of ideas be open and competitive. That will not be completely possible until education is liberated from the hands of the state. The future of freedom is closely linked to the depoliticization and comprehensive privatization of education in America. And Sheldon Richman's book is a powerful case for separating education from the state.

-Richard M. Ebeling Vice President of Academic Affairs The Future of Freedom Foundation

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Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.

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