Down with Compulsory Education!

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn:

“There can be little doubt that compulsory education was an extremely important step towards the totalitarian state—a step whose significance was by no means universally recognized.

“The very idea lying at the basis of compulsory education has, naturally, to be found in the notion that the children belong to the state or to ‘society’ rather than to their parents. De Sade, the ‘divine marquis,’ insisted that the children are a property of the republic. Jeremy Belknap in an ‘Election Sermon’ preached before the General Court New Hampshire in 1785 advocated equal and compulsory education for all, emphasizing that children belong rather to the state than to their procreators. Benjamin Rush wanted general education for the establishment of a more uniform, homogeneous and egalitarian nation. In 1791 Robert Coram, significantly, proposed schools in which religion, dead or foreign languages (!) should not be taught—the dream of Hitler and Nazi school reformers. Frances Wright, in the middle of the nineteenth century, campaigned for the compulsory education of all children by the state; they should be trained from the ages of two to sixteen in state boarding schools. Food and clothing, as well as the intellectual fare, should be entirely standardized. . . .”

(Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Time, pp 63 - 64)