Why Public Schools Must Die

Karen DeCoster is back from vacation (thank God) and is on fire as usual. In her post entitled "Invisible Masters", I found this quote from John Taylor Gatto:

Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.

Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn’t any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we’ve been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They’re like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don’t have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won’t surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent — or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.

Gatto wrote The Underground History of American Education which I have heard is an absolute must-read. Similar to Robert Higgs who argues that there is no failed policy, Gatto argues that the idiocracy in which we now live was intentionally designed; the founders of the modern public school wanted to create a population which would be loyal to the State. This is exactly the world we live in. Just mention secession to most people, and they will immediately recoil in horror. They will insinuate that you are a neo-confederate or racist or unpatriotic or a crank or all of the above. The United States is a great country, they will argue. "Who are you to wish its demise? Our unity makes us strong." Such reactions are a result of the education of the masses who have been indoctrinated with collectivism.

Etienne de La Boetie understood that people voluntarily submit to a government because they have been taught to do such and do not know any better:

Let us therefore admit that all those things to which he is trained and accustomed seem natural to man and that only that is truly native to him which he receives with his primitive, untrained individuality. Thus custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.

People who live life with incessant interference from governments at all levels have no idea what life could be like without the surfeit of rules and legislation. People may object to brazen violations of their freedom. Neverthless, they become inured to slow encroachments of the State and the subsequent generation never knew what freedoms they lost through their parents concessions. One is hard pressed to fight for freedoms he has never experienced.

This is why the State always takes over the educational system of any country and this is why public schools and all government intervention in the educational system (vouchers, standardized test, etc.) must end. The State knows this and does all it can to destroy the individual at the expense of the collective. H. L. Mencken diagnosed this problem best:

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him...One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them alike as much as possible and dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. 

Men and women who think for themselves eventually see the State as the criminal gang it is and they realize that the State's power rest on nothing but consent from the public. This is the Achilles' Heel of the State. The State prefers armed resistance to a battle of ideas. The State thrives off violence. Indeed the State was born in violence. Moreover, the violence will frighten the masses who will then run to the State as its protector. But it cannot fight mass civil disobedience. If the masses ignore the State and its rules, it will collapse and fall apart like a great Colossus. In the war against the State, the pen is truly mightier than the sword and education is its ink.

Comments

[aretae]

Anything by Gatto is good. I'd start with the 7-lesson school-teacher: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt It summarizes the whole bit.

[Ms. X]

This post sparked some thoughts about continued government encroachment and control, even within the schools. I posted a short essay about what I think is one reason government is banning spanking in schools. http://pissinontheroses.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-government-schools-are-banning.html

Not, that I am in favor of government educators spanking, but I think an argument can be made that compared to tasers and strip searches, it is the lesser evil. Of course, the best solution is free market schools, where the parent can choose exactly what level of control over their child they are willing to release to an educator.

[silvermine]

Reaon number 5,890 that I homeschool my kids.