Hardly a week goes by that there isn't
a story about some kind of lunacy or depravity being peddled by the
government school establishment. Some of it is crazy in an amusing
sort of way if you aren't the victim, such as the boy who got
suspended for biting a pastry into the form of a gun, even though it
looked nothing like a gun.
Many other things are pernicious, such
as countermanding the moral authority of the parents and teaching the
children things that they find abhorrent. Several years ago there was
a controversy over some books called Daddy's Roommate and
Heather Has Two Mommies. These were blatant homosexual
propaganda, but today they are used in many schools even if the
parents object. Why this is even a subject to be taught in school
would be a mystery were it not for its social engineering purpose.
Massachusetts has blazed new horizons
in insanity by asserting that students are to be treated as the sex they claim to be, not their chromosomal sex. What is this but
teaching mental illness? If a white student claims that he is black,
is he to be accommodated? The “transracial” student would
actually be on firmer ground since there would be no chromosomal
difference.
What could damage a child more than
teaching him that perception is reality? In later life, the person
might think he has money in the bank that isn't there. Is the bank
going to acquiesce to his perception or give him a jolt of reality?
A few years ago, I was walking back
from lunch with a friend of mine, Chris Mileto, and pontificating
about how government schools were bad and should be eliminated. He
summed it up very succinctly by saying “The public schools are the
workshop of Satan.” Many people know this in some form, but think
that they can reform the schools or get rid of the bad people running
things and everything will be fine. It won't be.
I have never heard any “reformer”
say that compulsory schooling is the problem. The government has no
business or authority compelling parents to send their children to
school. Does the government have the authority to compel a certain
diet? How about gym classes or dancing lessons? Almost anybody can
see a problem with compulsory church attendance, but compulsory
schooling has been around so long that people see nothing wrong with
it. No amount of reform will solve the problem. Once compulsion is
removed, all authority over curriculum evaporates, and voila, diversity
in education. Diversity is the highest good, right? Why not a little
diversity in thought?
Hilaire Belloc pointed out the problem
eighty-four years ago in a book called Survivals and New Arrivals.
“A universal and
compulsory system of instruction has for its first and main effect
uniformity. It produces to a pattern. It fills the millions
of a nation (at the age when the mind is being fixed) with one set of
ideas to the exclusion of others. No mere limited freedom of choice
in text-books and teachers can prevent this effect, when the whole
system is subject to State regulation, supervision, examination
and test..... It is not the particular form
of the system, it is its universal character which is of this effect.
On reflection we see that it must be so. A body of national
teachers will come into being and will be informed with a corporate
spirit. They will be trained all in much the same fashion to the
same fixed “standards” and with the same ends in view. They will
teach under the shadow of a vast bureaucracy and to ends set them by
an army of inspectors, examiners and department officials.
You have, therefore, here
one essential condition of the "Modern Mind"; its lack of
diversity; its mechanical deadness.....
Universal Compulsory
Instruction contains also on its compulsory side, as well as
in the matter of its universality, a force making for the
creation of the "Modern Mind." Compulsion, long continued,
breeds acceptance; and the acceptance without question of such
authority as it meets - especially that of print - 'blind faith"
we have said, "divorced from reason" - is a very mark of
the "Modern Mind."
.... The Parent does not choose his
child's instructor nor the nature of his teaching, both are imposed
by the Civil Authority. The child goes daily to and from that
institution, has its whole life coloured by it, knows that its
attendance is not an order of its parents but a public command
enforced by the Police.... It is at once teaching and law,
and those subjected to it are inoculated from their earliest years
with a paralysis in the faculty of distinction - of clarity in
thought through analysis. Look around you and note the incapacity
for strict argument, the impatience with exact definition, the
aversion to controversy (mother of all truth) and the facility in
mere affirmation. Herein lies their root.”
Leonard Read was the first person I ever read who argued against compulsory schooling. When the idea of abolishing compulsory schooling is first encountered, it sounds crazy to almost everybody because of its long practice. It is the taproot of everything that is wrong with American schools.
The schools don't need to be reformed,
they need to be abolished and the state needs to be forbidden any
authority over teaching whatsoever.