Mr. Libertarian on Education

[This entry was typed up as a follow-up to the Nock entry on education: Sacred cows are everywhere. Albert Jay Nock saw the fallacious ideas that surround the system of education. It is a system, like so many other sacred cows, that gets opulent support by its attachment to egalitarianism and democracy. Like most things called "progressive," it is a backwards and profligate system; hardly to be looked at as a truly progressive thing.]

“One of the best ways of regarding the problem of compulsory education is to think of the almost exact analogy in the area of that other great educational medium----the newspaper. What would we think of a proposal for the government, Federal or State, to use the taxpayers' money to set up a nationwide chain of public newspapers, and compel all people, or all children, to read them? . . . Compulsory public presses would be considered an invasion of the basic freedom of press; yet is not scholastic freedom at least as important as press freedom? Aren't both vital media for public information and education, for free inquiry and the search for truth? It is clear that the suppression of free instruction should be regarded with even greater horror than suppression of free press, since here the unformed minds of children are involved.”

A Glance at the Rise of Modern State Education

Murray Rothbard's excellent monograph Education: Free and Compulsory (you can buy it at Amazon) surveys how compulsory education was not started up, either in Europe or America, as some kind of wonderful, enlightening, and altruistic thing. A compulsory and statist system was started up for far more sinister reasons. From the very start it has been an ideological and religious weapon. (How could it not?)

As I tell my fellow Catholic friends, a major impetus to compulsory and statist education was aimed against the Church.

"The first modern movement for compulsory state education," Rothbard says in Education, "stemmed directly from the Reformation." Martin Luther and John Calvin both called for compulsory state education. They saw it as a force to mold obedience to their religions and to the State.

In Germany, Luther demanded that it be used to fight against "the devil." This included, writes Rothbard, "not only Jews, Catholics, and infidels, but also all other Protestant sects." In 1524, in response, Gotha created the first public school and Thurungia in 1527 started their own. And 1559 Wurtemburg created the first compulsory system.

Calvin in Geneva, a town that previously revolted "against the Duke of Savoy and the Catholic Church," was able to create "a number of public schools, at which attendance was compulsory."

Prussia became the "first to have a national system of compulsory education." It is not surprising, Rothbard notes, because Prussia was the most "despotic State in Europe" and that its "original inspiration . . . was Luther and his doctrine of obedience to State absolutism." It was also in Prussia, with King Frederick William III, that "progressive education" came.

France, touched by the French Revolution and its egalitarianism, with Napoleon brought compulsory State education.

With this other nation-States followed along, including England, whose "tradition of voluntarism was ... strongest."

What about America?

In the majority of American colonies, education was in the English tradition, i.e., voluntary parental education, with the only public schools being those established for poor families free to make use of the facilities. . . . The crucial exception was New England, the sparkplug of the collectivist educational system in America.

This exception was due to their Calvinist ideas. Thus, in 1642 they implemented compulsory laws and then in 1647 created public schools. Massachusetts Bay Colony first governor John Winthrop expressed this ideology well. He, says Rothbard, "regarded any opposition to the policies of the governor, particularly when he was governor, as positively seditious."

To try to remain still brief in this entry, Puritans expanded the locations they lived and with them expanded their views on education. Only Rhode Island in New England was the exception.

The Prussian System, and hence not only Calvinist ideas, as well had an influence in shaping the development of statist education in America. Later, and after the Revolutionary War, special interest groups offered it as a role model to adopt. Calvin E. Stowe (using very similar tyrannical rhetoric as Luther), a major statist educational pusher, did the same.

Rothbard says that "professional educationists were the major force, assisted by the trade unions, in imposing compulsory education in America."

Two central scholars that helped shape public opinion, being preeminent in the newspapers, were Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Both were radical socialists. While, fortunately, their full dream was not realized, ideas of "absolute equality and uniformity" did, to a great extent, come about. Major "educationists" including Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Calvin Wiley, and others advocated this goal of equality and uniformity. That is, to take a diverse people and "mold them into 'one people,'" and to instill with them (their) "moral values." Along with this was their ridicule of private schools.

Rothbard on Education and the Individual

First thing is first. Rothbard, in Education: Free and Compulsory, overviews that the growth of a new person in the world is chiefly of intellect. Learning is a 24-7 thing, so to speak, in which the child learns from his environment. This environment consists of the natural world, man-made things, and by observation of the interactions and associations of men. Most fundamentally, learning starts at home.

Learning and growing up is therefore something above and beyond just formal education. Moreover, education and the formation of personality, while developed by the impact of others of course, really comes down to the individual person. It is he that will ultimately decide upon the ideas formed in his head.

The need for formal education and schooling comes with assimilating intellectual knowledge. This knowledge requires a systematic and logical progression. The most important of this being reading since it opens the doors to other subjects of knowledge.

Because mankind is not made up of equals but persons of infinite differences, the best education is the one specialized to the given child. This is what, Rothbard says, makes individualized homeschooling superior to all other forms of formal education. It can directly target and accommodate the needs of the child. And who but the parents know this best? (Most of the basics the average parents have the ability to teach.)

The next best system would be an individual tutor. Private schools, with an instructor teaching many students at once, would be the next (but last). The problem here is that individualized education becomes less and less possible. It is for this reason that, by inevitability, it will be comparatively inferior. However, seeing that these schools work in the free market, they would allow greater specialization and individualized focus in comparison to a statist system, with its top-down approach and its collectivistic uniformity.

To Rothbard, the issue is: The Parents or the State? Who is going to have authority? We know what the socialist will say. For the freedom-lover, the answer must be the parents.

(Their authority is clearly the natural authority. Hence, giving the State the role of being father is to dismantle the family and its natural authority. It is the alleviating of investment in children by collectivizing or socializing them. How could this not produce a decline in the family? It must, like all forms of socialism. Some conservative, though, cheer on their socialism all the same. [The conservative moral socialist who thinks the State can bring about a paradise of virtue is as fanatic and deluded as the liberal economic socialist who sees the State bringing about a Garden of Eden paradise.] Mr. Sobran once said in an interview: "Americans believe in education. It is one of those strange features of American life; that we accept the principles of communism when it comes to schools.")

Rothbard vs. "Progressive" Education

The step to today's compulsory system was bad enough. But it did not end there. With an ever-expanding educational Leviathan came increased collectivization, centralization, and "progressive" ideas. (And there went the Great Tradition. "In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school," Sobran once wrote, "to offering remedial English in college.") Murray Rothbard, of course, was no fan of these trends. In a nutshell, he said, there are five general things that have happened.

For one, in "progressive" education there has been a letting go of systematic thinking and learning. The emphasis increasingly has been more to let the child "do what he likes" and on "the group." The "three Rs" have been more neglected. All of this has resulted in a perversion in the development of intellect.

Secondly, there has been the idea for education to promote "equality and uniformity." Everyone is viewed as equally educable and, thus, the teaching standards have been pushed down to the lowest common denominator. Even the most uneducable of children are forced into the system. Silly ideas of "grading subjectively" versus objectively have been propagated at times. And, additionally, it is seen as a big objective to prepare children for democracy. Children, however, are not taught systematically the subjects of history, politics, or economics to have informed views on the subjects that pertain to democracy. Instead what they are given is statist slogans and propaganda.

There is also, Rothbard went on, an "emphasis on 'frills'" in school. All this has done is further lessened formal education.

Fourth, it is seen that education must educate the "whole" of a child, beyond and above formal education. This whole idea replaces the family with the State.

And, finally, there has been a surged dependency on the State from all of this. It is the natural and logical result.

Rothbard vs. Voucher Welfarism

The last thing worth going over quickly is Rothbard's views on vouchers. To this end let us turn to the essays "Vouchers: What Went Wrong?" and "Education: Rethinking 'Choice'."

As I have said before, there was a brief time I thought they were a good idea. But then, alas, I found out that they were really another welfare program based on egalitarian ideas, and something that extends governmental control to private schools. (I should have thought: Many socialists, and neocon groups like the awful Heritage Foundation, like this idea, therefore it is probably bad.)

"Vouchers," Rothbard writes,

would greatly extend the welfare system so that middle-class taxpayers would pay for private as well as public schooling for the poor. People without children, or parents who homeschool, would have to pay taxes for both public and private school. On the crucial principle that control always follows subsidy, the voucher scheme would extend government domination from public schools to the as-yet more or less independent private schools.

Especially in regard to the suburbs, the voucher scheme would wreck the fairly worthwhile existing suburban schools in order to subject them to a new form of egalitarian forced busing, in which inner city kids would be foisted upon the suburban schools. A most unwelcome "education revolution."