Government Schools Against Education

GREETINGS FROM SEDONA

“…They (educators) do not subject American children to rigid …discipline. On the contrary, they try to make schools so enjoyable that the children will not realize that the police compel them to be there. (But the children know it.) The teachers try to make learning easy, a game. But real learning is not easy; it requires self-discipline and hard work. The attempt to make learning effortless actually keeps a child from discovering the pleasure of self-discipline and of the mental effort that overcomes difficulties as does a thoroughly good job.
“This is cruel treatment of the new generations of Americans who must come out of this compulsory and yet too softly pampering schooling to face the realities of a world in which human beings are free and living ids not easy. And it is not the best preparation for inheriting the leadership of the World Revolution for freedom.”

Guess when this was written!

I grew up in the golden ghetto of Great Neck, New York which boasted arguably the best public school system in the country at the time. While doing my homework, my super educated father would look over my shoulder and shake his head at how watered down and easy it was compared to what he faced at the same stage of his schooling. He graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1931. That’s correct folks, the Bronx in New York City!!!

My father passed away before my study of education in America proved that the same could be said of his schooling compared to the standards of fifty years earlier. This brings us to the quote at the top of this post. Any guesses when it was written? No doubt, it succinctly describes the state of our schooling today. In fact it was taken from THE DISCOVERY OF FREEDOM, an iconic libertarian classic published in 1939 by Rose Wilder Lane. Ms. Lane’s expertise in the matter of understanding children is well established. She was the daughter of Laura Ingalls. Ms. Lane took the stories of her mother’s childhood and created a series of wildly popular children’s books we now know of as the “Little House On The Prairie” television series.

Compulsory, state financed schooling was never about education. It was always about propaganda. Progressives of the 19th century were appalled at the masses of dumb, unsocialized immigrants coming to America, and believed they required proper instruction to become obedient American citizens. When they finally achieved their goals they adopted the system of 18th century Prussia as the model foisted on your children. Progressives learned of this system through Napoleon who marveled at the Prussian soldier’s efficient obedience. When Napoleon inquired how this was done, he was informed that it was through the Prussian school system.

It is therefore unsurprising that the quality of education delivered by the state controlled school system has been less than stellar. Economics also tells us that when you have a virtual monopoly, costs and prices rise while quality falls. What shocked me in my study of the history of compulsory state schools is that, from the very beginning there was a deliberate dumbing down of the curriculum. The original reason was that the stupid immigrants the progressives wanted to propagandize could not possibly keep up with the existing American standards. That dumbing down process has continued over the decades with the same reasoning for each new minority group in faddish focus at any particular time.

My favorite illustration of the snobbishness of the educator establishment involves the massive influx of veterans onto college campuses under the GI Bill after WWII. The elitist educators were horrified, sneering at the possibility these redneck rubes could complete a college course. What happened was those GI’s rolled over their preppy peers because the veterans had seen death and were not about to waste this opportunity getting wasted at frat parties.

Enterprises subject to market forces will immediately copy anything that looks like it has an edge. Their survival depends on making sure they are keeping up with the competition. Yet, the scores of success stories in government schools across the country over the last thirty plus years have been largely ignored and submerged in bureaucratic sludge. The key principle that makes this depressing development so common is that in any government enterprise the customer is looked upon as an annoyance rather than as a source of revenue and profit. In schools the customers are students and parents. Extraordinary performance has no impact on income for the deliverers of the service in government schools.

Attempts at changing things have been feeble at best with little system wide impact. What must be done is not merely privatization. We must marketize the schools. A charter school is not really part of the private marketplace. A half baked voucher system must ultimately fail as long as the government can bury it in bureaucracy. What is required is nothing less than removing the federal government with all connection to our primary schools (especially funding) and a 100% voucher system where the parents choose any school, including home school. Then the customers will reward and punish producers of educational services as ruthlessly as they do everything else in the marketplace. Lord knows, nobody is punishing the perpetrators of poor service delivered in government schools today.

I am a big fan of home schooling. Martin Gross, a prolific reporter on the educational establishment, discovered twenty years ago that the average el-hi school teacher came from the bottom third of his or her high school class. In my mind that is just a couple of notches above idiot, especially now after an additional two dumbed down decades. Therefore, we cannot be surprised that when we segregate millions of prepubescent animals for nearly twenty years, supervised by the intellectually challenged, that uncivilized, barely literate, uneducated, boorish brutes emerge from the system.

In fact, while one size never fits all, as a general proposition I am opposed to nearly all the forms of schooling I see today. The virtual government monopoly has crushed any innovative spirit. The private market has already made great strides with innovations such as “Your Baby Can Read” which proves that the quote above is dead wrong in saying that learning is hard when in fact it is great fun! In addition, children must become part of the general society as quickly as possible. This, and related issues will be tackled in a future post. In the meantime I highly recommend Robert Epstein’s THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE.

All the best to you all,

Stephen Reiss
[email protected]

5/2/11

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