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Old November 20th, 2009 #15
Alex Linder
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How Did We Get Into This Mess?

by James Ostrowski

[Note: This is the introduction to Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids]

“Socialists, who were very active in the public school movement, began operating covertly in secret cells in America as early as 1829, before the word socialism was even invented.”

~ Samuel L. Blumenthal [1]

A quick history lesson

This isn’t a history book. It is a book about why you should take your kids out of government schools. Yet, misconceptions about history may discourage some readers from fairly considering the evidence and arguments that are to follow. What I ask is that you keep an open mind. Put your preconceptions aside and take a fresh look at this important subject. That will be easier to do after a brief review of the origins and nature of the government school as we know it today.

Were government schools established because private society and families refused to educate the children, resulting in lifelong ignorance and illiteracy? Were the motives of the reformers pure, selfless and concerned only with the well-being of the children? Surely, after these reforms were in place, school attendance rose, illiteracy disappeared and the quality of education vastly improved.

None of those things happened!

Contrary to myth, government schools were not immaculately conceived. The common mindset with respect to this or that government program is that it always existed and must always exist or the end of the world would be nigh. However, government schools did not always exist. Before compulsory, tax-supported government schools became the norm around 1890, American society had survived and thrived without them for over 200 years [2] while creating one of the most successful and literate societies in human history. The United States was well on its way to surpassing prior world leader Great Britain in per capita GDP before even half of its states adopted compulsory education. In fact, as late as 1900, when the United States had unquestionably become a world power, only “10 percent of teenagers were enrolled in high school,” [3] and just six percent graduated. [4]

James Tooley, a researcher who has studied the shift from private to government schools worldwide, writes:

“A broad range of evidence from Victorian England and Wales and nineteenth century America shows that near-universal schooling was achieved before the state intervened in education. The evidence suggests that the impact was to curb what was already flourishing―so much so that the picture of education in this and previous centuries seems far bleaker than it would have been had the private alternative not been suppressed and supplanted.” [5]

In sharp contrast, today in Western countries with compulsory free schooling, as much as twenty percent of the population is functionally illiterate. Schooling may be universal; education is not. [6] Even universal schooling is a myth. As many as ten percent of government students are absent on the average day, more than twice the rate of private school students. [7]

If government schools were not founded on necessity, what was their genesis? There were a number of political, religious and ideological forces behind the institution of compulsory government schools. Notably, none included the widespread failure of private schools and families to educate children.

Here is a quick review of the main historical roots of compulsory government schools in the Western World. It starts with Martin Luther who urged the German princes to “compel the people to send their children to school” in 1524, because “we are warring with the devil.” [8] Historian Murray Rothbard explains:

“The Reformers advocated compulsory education for all as a means of inculcating the entire population with their particular religious views, as an indispensable aid in effective ‘war with the devil’ and the devil's agents. For Luther, these agents constituted a numerous legion: not only Jews, Catholics, and infidels, but also all other Protestant sects. Luther's political ideal was an absolute State guided by Lutheran principles and ministers. The fundamental principle was that the Bible, as interpreted by Luther, was the sole guide in all things. He argued that the Mosaic code awarded to false prophets the death penalty, and that it is the duty of the State to carry out the will of God. The State's duty is to force those whom the Lutheran Church excommunicates to be converted back into the fold. There is no salvation outside the Lutheran Church, and it is not only the duty of the State to compel all to be Lutherans, but its sole object. Such was the goal of the initial force behind the first compulsory school system in the Western world, and such was the spirit that was to animate the system.”

John Calvin was the second major religious figure to endorse compulsory schooling. Like Luther, he did so to spread his religious doctrine by government force. And like Luther, he offered the political authorities this inducement: his schools would preach “the duty of obedience to rulers.” [9] That must have been music to the ears of the political authorities of the time.

Next comes Prussia. Under Luther’s influence, the militaristic and authoritarian Prussians pioneered compulsory education in Europe. [10] Rothbard writes,

“Modern Prussian despotism emerged as a direct result of the disastrous defeat inflicted by Napoleon. In 1807, the Prussian nation began to reorganize and gird itself for future victories. Under King Frederick William III, the absolute State was greatly strengthened. His famous minister, von Stein, began by abolishing the semi-religious private schools, and placing all education directly under the Minister of the Interior. In 1810, the ministry decreed the necessity of State examination and certification of all teachers. In 1812, the school graduation examination was revived as a necessary requirement for the child's departure from the state school, and an elaborate system of bureaucrats to supervise the schools was established in the country and the towns. It is also interesting that it was this reorganized system that first began to promote the new teaching philosophy of Pestalozzi, who was one of the early proponents of ‘progressive education.’ Hand in hand with the compulsory school system went a revival and great extension of the army, and in particular the institution of universal compulsory military service.”

The American “reformers” would later look to Prussia as a model for an American system. Professor Richard M. Ebeling summarizes how the Prussian model lives on today:

“[M]odern, universal compulsory education has its origin in the 19th century Prussian idea that it is the duty and responsibility of the state to indoctrinate each new generation of children into being good, obedient subjects who will be loyal and subservient to political authority and to the legitimacy of the political order. Young minds are to be filled with a certain set of ideas that reflect the vision of the official state educators concerning ‘proper behavior’ and ‘good citizenship.’

“Over the generations, the content of what proper behavior and good citizenship means has changed, with changes in prevailing political and cultural currents in America, but the fact remains that the essence of the system was designed with that purpose in mind, and still operates on that basis. The parent is viewed as a backward and harmful influence in the formative years of the child’s upbringing, an influence that must be corrected for and replaced by the ‘enlightened’ professional teacher who has been trained, appointed and funded by the state. The public school, therefore, is a ‘reeducation camp’ in which the child is to be remade in the proper ‘politically correct’ image.” [11]

Compulsory education in America also came in through religious machinations. Scholar Diane Ravitch describes the pro-government school forces:

“The reformers launched a campaign known as the common school movement from about 1830–1860. Its leaders were mainly aligned with the Whig Party and with organized Protestant religions. Neither Catholics nor Jacksonian Democrats liked the centralization aspects of this movement. . . . The common school movement shared the rhetoric and fervor of evangelical Protestantism; many of its leaders were ordained Protestant ministers who saw themselves as men with a mission.” [12]

Part of the mission was anti-Catholicism. One of the leading promoters of government schools “inspired anti-Catholic riots” in Baltimore. [13] “The Nativists . . . believed that foreigners and especially Catholics were a threat to the American tradition of liberty.” [14] Ravitch writes that the reformers were “eager to prevent Catholics from obtaining any public funding for their schools and require the use of the Protestant Bible in the public schools.” [15] The Protestant political majority was concerned that Catholics were being educated in their own religious schools. Thus, states began to subsidize Protestant schools with tax dollars. The “mission” was finally accomplished when the “evangelical Protestants prevailed in their efforts to exclude Catholic schools from any participation in public funding. . . . the leaders openly and boastfully made anti-Catholicism the dominant theme of their attacks.” [16]

Later of course, the Protestants would be hoisted by their own petard when the Supreme Court banned prayer from the government schools in 1963. Those who live by politics shall perish by it. Just as Edward Ross had predicted in the 19th century: “While the priest is leaving the civil service, the schoolmaster is coming in. As the state shakes itself loose from the church, it reaches out for the school.” [17]

Murray Rothbard agrees with Ravitch:

“It was the desire of the Anglo-Saxon majority to tame, channel, and restructure the immigrants, and in particular to smash the parochial school system of the Catholics, that formed the major impetus for educational ‘reform.’” [18]

Catholics of course stubbornly retained their own school system in response to the Protestants. So successful were these schools that states started to ban them. They survived this second concerted attack by the nativists including the Ku Klux Klan when the Supreme Court in 1925 held that parents had the right to send their children to private schools. [19]

For 150 years, subsistence-wage nuns, brothers and priests allowed the Catholic schools to compete by keeping tuition low. However, because of a sharp decline in their numbers, and their replacement by lay teachers paid at market rates, the government school system is finally beginning to realize its original mission: to knock off Catholic schools. The religious orders fought the good fight for 150 years. Without a major change in policy that levels the playing field, Catholic schools, with one-half of all private school students, will soon be in deep, deep trouble. Projecting out current trends, they will dwindle down to a few schools for the children of bankers, corporate executives and doctors that will hardly deserve the name “Catholic” which means universal.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ostrowski/ostrowski93.1.html