forcedschool

[forcedschool]

Religious vs Secular: Supreme Court confusion

In previous blog posts I have covered the obvious fact that government-controlled education is unconstitutional. In a society that claims to be some form of democracy, it is the right and obligation of citizens to inform government functionaries of what the citizenry thinks about issues and how to act upon them — not the reverse. Therefore governments have no legitimate right to tell citizens what they must learn and, in the end, what to think.

It seems self-evident that education cannot be provided without entering the territory of worldview issues. A worldview is essentially a framework for understanding the world and it includes the big questions of life: origins, meaning, morals and destiny. Therefore, a worldview is essentially indistinguishable from a religious belief system (including those belief systems that deny the existence of the supernatural). Government-controlled curricula clearly teach worldview/religious subjects — funded primarily by property taxes which, of course, violates the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Recently retired law professor, Jeffrey C. Tuomala, published an essay titled Is Tax-Funded Education Unconstitutional? The answer is, of course, an emphatic yes! He approaches the issue from the perspective that courts and society in general have created a false distinction between the secular and religious. There are all kinds of topics that blur the line between secular and religious, e.g. philosophy, sociology, politics, morality and ethics. For purposes of government schooling, the courts have relegated all of these subjects into the secular category, and are therefore approved for public school curricula. However, these topics are only secular in the narrow sense that they are not affiliated with any specific established religion, but they are an essential element of every religion or worldview. And, as such, they are essentially private matters and opinions that should be outside of the legitimate purview of compulsory government schooling.

Tuomala notes that "The Supreme Court, and most Americans, vacillate between the diametrically opposed principles that the state has no power to establish an orthodoxy of opinion and that the most important function of state government is to inculcate values through public schools." He goes on to provide a thorough analysis of the philosophical and theological bases for the discordance. He points to the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) and other early documents for a coherent view of religious vs secular distinctions. However, his thesis rests upon the assumption that our nation's laws were founded and were intended to operate on the basis of a biblical worldview. Without that general acceptance of a Christian (or at least theistic) worldview, it becomes difficult to make the distinctions between religious and secular activity in a logical, consistent manner.

As I noted in an earlier post, the Supreme Court has, on more than one occasion, affirmed that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” (e.g. Troxel vs Granville , 2000). Yet we have compulsory schooling laws in every state that regulate education and impose serious limitations on the exercise of that illusory right.

And in another post discussing Wisconsin v Yoder (1972):

Since the court didn’t think it necessary to ground its reasoning on the Constitution and simply asserted the state’s power, witness the table pounding with these quotes from the majority opinion [emphasis added]:

There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education. … where nothing more than the general interest of the parent in the nurture and education of his children is involved, it is beyond dispute that the State acts “reasonably” and constitutionally in requiring education to age 16 in some public or private school meeting the standards prescribed by the State. No one can question the State’s duty to protect children from ignorance ...

Students of logic will see the fallacy of “begging the question” in operation in the court’s reasoning, i.e. simply assuming a claim is true does not serve as evidence for that claim.

Given the legal landscape, it is not likely that a future Supreme Court would rule that compulsory government schooling is unconstitutional. Not to mention that the mind-laundry of government schooling is a much too precious tool of control to voluntarily relinquish.

[forcedschool]

Lessons not learned in the COVID wars Part 2

Part 1 is here.

Lesson 3: The oppression and the lies that were accepted by the public showed a profound lack of critical thinking and exposed the level of cowardice and corruption of many social institutions. Even now, the COVID jabs continue to wreak havoc on our people. The evidence is overwhelming and easily found by anyone who cares to look, but it is still suppressed by corporate media.

Romans 12 calls us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Sadly, the opposite occurred with the vast majority of churches. Perhaps part of that problem is the politically convenient misinterpretation of Romans 13 where we are called to be obedient to authority. Any government that rewards evil and punishes good should obviously be resisted. Any government that violates the Constitution through demands that people submit to injections, close businesses and restricts assembly, movement (and even breathing!) for a concocted "emergency" has lost its delegated authority from God in those areas.

Where are the calls for justice and the warnings against the continued genocidal “recommendations” and remaining mandates? In the future, how will our churches respond to proposed climate lockdowns or other "emergencies?" I think we have a fairly good idea.

Lesson score on resisting a sociopathic government: Fail

Homework: The original structure of our government was given to us through the providence of God and the sacrifices of our ancestors. As government corruption becomes more evident and flagrant, we are told to simply accept it and be good citizens—with “good” being defined by state actors who betray the Constitution. So, what shall we do?

For those of us who have recovered from our public school indoctrination, it would seem obvious at this point that we should not look to so-called “leaders” wherever they may reside and instead look to our collective power of “do not comply.” It takes courage to be among the first to say no to unlawful government actions. The New Testament presents our ultimate role model and He was fearless. Jesus practiced civil disobedience and so should we when our government violates our laws and our civil rights.

[forcedschool]

Lessons not learned in the COVID wars part 1

Lesson 1: "Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist." Friedrich Hayek.

It should be apparent by now that both state governments and the federal government were not acting with constitutionally permissible authority regarding COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns. In the state of Texas, citizens are ostensibly protected from the predations of a coercive state government by the Texas Bill of Rights. You will search in vain to find any section of the Texas Constitution that allows the kind of actions taken by the governor to restrict, threaten and harass citizens through his ex cathedra dictates prompted by a supposed emergency. However, Article 1 Section 29 of the Texas Constitution prohibits such actions:

To guard against transgressions of the high powers herein delegated, we declare that every thing in this 'Bill of Rights' is excepted out of the general powers of government, and shall forever remain inviolate, and all laws contrary thereto, or to the following provisions, shall be void.

Although a few Republican Party committees in Texas at the county level censured the governor for his egregious actions, there has been mostly silence from the political class that rules the state. Bills attempting to put limits on the governor's emergency authority have failed. And that is the first lesson not learned. We cannot rely on politicians to “save” us from actions taken by the state that are effectively unlawful and harmful. At this point, there is nothing impeding future draconian, constitution-violating restrictions and, in fact, there is now a politically uncontested precedent.

Lesson score on understanding and enforcing the constitutional limits on government: Fail.

Lesson 2: It has been well known for many years that the CDC and FDA have been “captured” by the pharmaceutical industry. Here are just two examples from the long, sordid history of the government-pharmaceutical industrial complex: in 2000, a U.S. House Reform Committee report disclosed the serious conflicts of interest with the CDC's and FDA's vaccine advisory committees; in 2004 the US Office of Special Counsel urged Congress to take action on evidence of scientific fraud in the CDC’s vaccine division. Many such events have occurred over the years but nothing substantive has been done. All of these findings, of what is essentially criminal conduct, are in the public record. Yet, COVID-19 arrived on the scene and our naive former president (who remains unrepentant to this day) charged ahead with Operation Warp Speed and issued a national emergency proclamation that set in motion the tyranny that we all endured.

Would citizens have been so willing to accept all of this fearmongering and oppression had they known that the “advice” and mandates issuing like bovine residue from the FDA and CDC was scripted to line the regulators' personal pockets and please their corporate masters? I hope not. Since the mainstream media happily reports whatever their Big Pharma advertisers want, there is “nothing to see here.” Has anything significant changed in the reporting on the FDA or CDC and therefore, the public's general understanding of the FDA/CDC criminal cartel? I don't think so.

Lesson score on understanding the corruption of the so-called regulators: another Fail.

Part 2 is here.

[forcedschool]

School choice wars: Texas tries again

The Texas legislature does not convene until January 14, 2025, but some school choice bills have already been filed. The Senate (SB1) and House (HB1) versions both provide funding for tuition, materials and other approved expenses for certain eligible learning environments (other than public schools or charter schools) using an Education Savings Account mechanism.

In HB1, Texas will fund each account in an amount “equal to 75 percent of the estimated statewide average amount of funding per student,” while HB1 has a hard cap of $8,000 for eligible students. Homeschoolers are capped at $1,000 under both bills.

It is interesting to see the expansion of the Texas Education Agency's (TEA) influence in these bills. Private schools are not required to be accredited in Texas. However, if they want to be "approved education service providers," they will have to be accredited now. That means undergoing accreditation by an approved (ultimately by TEA) accreditation organization. In Texas, the entity that directly oversees accrediting organizations is the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission (TEPSAC). Among various requirements, accredited private schools “must annually administer a national norm-referenced test approved by the school’s accrediting agency.”

Home school enrichment programs (termed "pod learning" in the bills) are excluded, as expected. However, costs otherwise allowed for homeschooling appear to be covered under such a program, i.e. books and other materials etc., since they are specific to the home schooled student. Any private tutor must be an accredited or licensed public school teacher (or retired as such) or an "educator" at an accredited school.

Some initial thoughts regarding these bills:

Private schools will be lured into accreditation that is ultimately controlled by the State.

Homeschoolers are mostly left out. One could argue that the financial burden of living on one income (in a two parent home) is likely greater than the cost of private school, yet the funding is 1/8 or less.

The process creates another layer of bureaucracy to oversee the distribution of funds.

Since it is essentially a voucher system rather than tax credits, the State will view the money as its own. Therefore, as the political landscape shifts over time, there is the risk of increasing control over government-funded private and home schools.

I realize that such restrictions will likely be necessary to overcome some of the complaints of the public school lobby and these bills are subject to amendment, of course. But there is no doubt that there is increasing regulation imposed by this funding mechanism. Whether it is worth that concession is certainly debatable. In any case, it just proves the old English axiom "He who takes the king's shilling must do the king's bidding."

[forcedschool]

The Costs of Conflict

There is a new report published by UCLA titled The Costs of Conflict, The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflict on Public Schools in the United States. It could be renamed "School Boards are Spending Too Much Money Fighting Troglodytes."

The main message that an education freedom advocate will quickly see in this report is that people who disagree with the current narrative are simply dangerous nuisances. The reports states that "There always will be different viewpoints in a diverse society about the purpose of public education and how schools should advance societal goals." But what if a sizeable portion of the parent population has a different view of the purpose of education and does not agree with the educrats' "societal goals?" Ignoring such people has led to school boards dealing with supposed "disrespectful speech, misinformation, violent rhetoric, and threats." Given that many ordinary families cannot afford a typical private school (especially with multiple children) and may not have the confidence or physical ability to home school, the government school system is effectively a monopoly. It is a unique monopoly since it can take your children and your life if you resist with sufficient vigor.

Apparently, the cost of fighting these dangerous nuisances in the 2023-2024 fiscal year was $3.2 billion. So their answer is to reduce the ability of "conflict entrepreneurs" to get on school boards or influence the public:

But rejecting this small number of conflict entrepreneurs would help ensure that community members communicate their disagreements in a manner consistent with democratic principles. This means upholding norms of respect, evidence based reasoning, and civil deliberation that embraces the well being and dignity of all.

So democratic principles require suppression of people whom they find disagreeable. That seems to be the practice of many political school boards and government schooling in general.

It is obvious to education freedom advocates that there can never be peace and tranquility when there is compulsion in education. As noted elsewhere in this blog, compulsory schooling is certainly unconstitutional (but ignored by the courts) and is a civil rights violation in the same sense that compulsory attendance at a state church or a tax to support it are egregious violations of the Bill of Rights.

[forcedschool]

Update on the eBook

There is a comprehensive review of the book here.

Although it is still on Amazon and elsewhere, you can download a free copy here. It is offered in .mobi (Kindle), ePub and pdf.

[forcedschool]

Stronghold of the Enemy

Several years ago, I had reached a point in my blogging about coercive schooling where I was satisfied that my cumulative body of posts were sufficient to cover most of the the issues fairly well. I didn't want to simply keep posting information that was documenting the most recent outrages and excesses of the “evil empire.” The next logical step was trying to find out how to reach a broader and mostly younger audience who needed  to hear the truth about the false god of government schooling. I initially wanted to put together a more academically-oriented anthology of essays by different authors—essentially an update to Rickenbacker's Twelve-Year Sentence. However, that book was not read by a wide audience and I concluded that a new version would not do much to promote education freedom. In the end, I decided to write a fictional account of a high school student who fights back against the oppressive system. The pre-release feedback has been positive so perhaps it will reach that younger, wider audience that needs to read it.

Here is the first paragraph of the book description:

Stronghold of the Enemy is both a warning and a possible road map to education freedom. Battling the government education system and the sinister forces that support it, Andrew and his fellow teen friends challenge one of Satan's biggest and oldest strongholds in America. Initially using his natural gifts of a keen intellect and persuasive arguments, he later turns to the supernatural to fight forces beyond the temporal world that have enslaved millions of young minds and bodies.

It may offend some conservatives and progressives alike due to the arguments against government control of education, criticisms of qualified immunity for government employees, “law enforcement” oppression and other “sacred cows” of modern America. The story also follows the main character's transition away from government schooling's naturalistic worldview to a Christian perspective.  My hope is that the book provides some solace and encouragement to those unfortunate souls trapped in the government school gulag. And maybe it will encourage some parents to do the right thing.

The ebook can be found on these platforms: https://books2read.com/drmcfadden

See here for an update.

[forcedschool]

Old time religion in modern clothes

As I have examined the phenomenon of government controlled schooling, it has been a continuing mystery to me why this type of totalitarian enterprise could have been imposed on a country that was ostensibly founded on the primacy of individual liberty and freedom of conscience. I can understand why today’s citizens are generally oblivious to freedom of conscience issues due to the indoctrination and psychological conditioning that are essential components of government schooling – but why would such a system be accepted by citizens who had not been programmed to accept it? As noted in my previous posts, that system was imposed through propaganda and false promises and was often met with resistance, but due to the police power of the state it was ultimately imposed top-down by special interests. However, even considering political manipulation and the raw power of the state, there still seemed to be something missing. 

My recent explorations of the history of the 1st Amendment have helped provide some clarity on the issue. One important fact to remember about our nation’s history is that there was very little religious freedom in colonial America. Yes, it is true that the establishment of some of the colonies was driven by people escaping religious intolerance in England but the rulers of those colonies wanted freedom only for their particular brand of Christianity and had little tolerance for presumed heretics such as Quakers and Baptists. In fact, persecutions of varying degrees of severity were the norm for those dissenters. Civil and criminal laws were heavily based on Old Testament theology so punishments were very harsh by modern standards. Frankly, looking back from the 21st Century, it seems difficult to find Christ in the “Christianity” that was dominant at the time. The only colony with true religious freedom was Rhode Island. That colony was founded by Roger Williams who was banished from Massachusetts for preaching his Christian beliefs.

Unfortunately, with the advent of government schooling in America in the 19th Century, the country began to return to its pre-revolutionary intolerant roots. Where there were once tax-supported churches and clergy, there were now taxes imposed for schools and teachers. Compulsory church attendance laws were replaced with school truancy laws. Laws enforcing the Sabbath became curfews imposed on school age children. In early America, Baptists were accused of child abuse since they refused to baptize infants. In modern America, anyone not schooling their children in a government approved manner is presumed guilty of the same charge. It seems that government schooling has become the modern version of an intolerant religion. As time has progressed and the religion of schooling has grown in power, the penalties for dissenting have grown more harsh with the preferred punishments of heretics being fines, incarceration and the state seizing children from otherwise exemplary parents. 

Just like most colonists in early America, today’s citizens accept (and often embrace) the modern equivalent of those unjust laws. As before, dissent is seen as dangerous heresy that must be crushed. The terminology and the mechanisms of control have changed but the result is the same: oppression. Unlike colonial America, we have a Bill of Rights that is supposed to protect us from oppression by our government. Will we ever be able to reassert our rights and constrain government to its proper role in this area? All I know is that such a question will not likely receive serious consideration in any high school civics lesson – even if a young heretic manages to raise the issue.

[forcedschool]

The Constitution of the United States: Void where prohibited by law

I suspect that most people in America don't realize that the constitution of the former USSR provided for "freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations" (Article 50), and "freedom of conscience" (Article 52).  How well those rights were upheld can be best illustrated by a common joke from the Soviet era: In the USA and the USSR there is freedom of speech but in America you have freedom after speech.

Unfortunately, many of the rights that we have enjoyed in the past are being steadily eroded by new laws, regulations and court decisions. We are seeing some of the same legal fictions and obfuscations that the Soviet people endured.  A citizen's civil rights in the USSR were not absolute but were contingent as noted in this blog post by Ilya Somin, Professor of Law at George Mason University:

....Article 59 emphasizes that “Citizens’ exercise of their rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance of their duties and obligations,” and those duties include “comply[ing] with standards of socialist conduct” (Article 59) and “safeguard[ing] the interests of the Soviet state, and …. enhanc[ing] its power and prestige” (Article 62). Thus, the individual rights in the Soviet Constitution could be overridden in any cases where they conflict with “standards of socialist conduct” or somehow threaten the interests of the Soviet state or its “power and prestige.” …. A careful reading of the Soviet Constitution – or even just the individual rights sections – leaves little doubt that it was written for a totalitarian communist state.

It is not difficult to see that restricting our individual rights because of "national security" concerns is just a variant of "safeguarding the interests of the Soviet state." Similarly, the denial of civil rights has been part of the governmental control of education since the 19th Century in America.  In the Supreme Court case Wisconsin vs. Yoder, the court used fallacious reasoning to make this audacious statement: "There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education." The court simply made this assertion without reference to constitutional authority since this assumed power over education violates a number of provisions of the Bill of Rights (the 1st, 4th, 14th Amendments and arguably others). So, once again, you have all these rights - unless they have to be denied to safeguard the perceived interests of the State.

The Supreme Court has, on more than one occasion, affirmed that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” (e.g. Troxel vs Granville , 2000). Yet we have compulsory schooling laws in every state that regulate education and impose serious limitations on the exercise of that illusory right.  For citizens who don’t have the financial means to pay for both public schools (through taxation) and private alternatives, it is clear who is in total control of their child’s education (and it isn’t mom and pop). Even if you have the money to use other alternatives, the state is ultimately still in control through their education statutes.

As under the Soviet system, some rights are more equal than others.  We can see a good example of the reasoning that justifies suppression of education rights in a quote from a paper titled  Why homeschooling should be regulated by Robert Reich, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University:

Strictly enforced regulations ensure that parents do not wield total and unchecked authority over the education of their children. What is at stake here is not a question of social utility or stability, whether home schooling could threaten democracy. What is at stake is the justice that we owe children, that they receive an education that cultivates their future citizenship, their individual freedom, and that teaches them at least basic academic skills, skills that are necessary for ably exercising both their citizenship and their freedom.

The underlying assumption appears to be that the job of education is too important to be left to “unchecked” potentially unreliable parents – so we must defer to government control.  Exactly how government schooling is better able to meet his stated requirements is, of course, not addressed.  There are also many other questions that are raised by his assertions. For example, what kind of citizens would the government like to create: independent thinkers or obedient taxpayers and employees? Anyone who has attended government schools knows the answer to that question. Exactly how do you teach children about freedom while they are incarcerated in prison-like institutions?  It’s like beating children to teach them about nonviolence.

Denying individual and parental rights on the pretense of “justice for children” or an ill-defined “right to education” is something that we would expect in a totalitarian society.  If we are to slow the march toward that society, we need education freedom. It would certainly help the cause if our courts actually defended our civil rights rather than (in Soviet style) subverting them to satisfy the “interests of the state.”

[forcedschool]

Freedom of conscience: a missing element in the education debate

In his Age of Reason pamphlet (1807), Thomas Paine declared that “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." Thomas Jefferson's famed letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut mentions how the First Amendment effectively establishes a "wall of separation between church and state."  These men, plus the many others that influenced or participated in the founding of the United States, were very familiar with the dangers of state religions and wished to prevent establishing such a religion in America.

Underlying the First Amendment is the concept of freedom of conscience.  It can be defined as: "The right to follow one’s own beliefs in matters of religion and morality."  Freedom of conscience is normally considered a human right, which is "any basic right or freedom to which all human beings are entitled and in whose exercise a government may not interfere (including rights to life and liberty as well as freedom of thought and expression and equality before the law)."

Unfortunately, most of the debates in the public square tend to focus on a narrow definition of religion when discussing the influences of "religion" on government policy. If we consider "religion and morality," we will find that they are essentially elements of a worldview. A worldview can be defined as "a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity's relation to it." 

When worldviews attempt to explain the "big questions of life" they are essentially indistinguishable from religious thought. For example both worldviews and religions attempt to deal with these four issues: 1.) origin of man and the universe, 2.) the meaning of life, 3.) morals, and 4.) a person’s destiny.

What does all this have to do with public schools and the state's ultimate control over the education of our children?

First, there is a widely held belief that public schools are "secular." In a narrow definition they are " secular" (i.e. without an affiliation with any specific religion) but a more fundamental (and honest) definition shows that they are no more free from "religion" than the local Roman Catholic private school down the road. How the state attempts to answer the four issues above may not be based on any particular religion but the answers they provide are informed by various worldviews that are popular today among the people that establish curricula and approve the textbooks. Since these people have a very significant influence in the development of children's worldviews, one could argue that we have a state religious system and the thousands of public school buildings are the temples of that religion. In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the Imperial Cult of ancient Rome where that set of beliefs was seen as a politically useful and necessary unifying force of the empire.

Second, I know of no way of providing an education without some sort of coherent system of thought that is directly founded upon a worldview. This raises several important questions. Given the above, should the government (or if you prefer, "society") impose a worldview on its youngest citizens? Should every parent, under the force of law (i.e. the threat of violence), be required to ensure that his or her child is "educated" in the government-approved way? Should taxpayers be forced to pay for so-called secular schools that in the course of their instruction, either directly or indirectly, year after year, send messages to their captive audiences about origins, meaning, morality and destiny that are essentially private matters (and beyond the realm of science as classically defined)?

Thomas Jefferson clearly favored promoting education. He said that regarding the "diffusion of knowledge" that "...no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness."  He is often quoted by the education establishment when defending the government education monopoly. However, being sensitive to freedom of conscience issues, he also said this: “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation [removal] and education of the infant against the will of the father” (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817). 

As with other "religions established by law,"  our state-controlled schooling system is no stranger to persecution.  Anyone who follows homeschooling news will find plenty of accounts of government agents ensuring that temple attendance is enforced or at least the state liturgy is practiced in the form and place acceptable to the government. Disobedience is costly.

Although some of the priests and acolytes of our state religion may wish it to be so, the state has not yet taken complete control of the feeding, clothing and housing of the majority of our children. However, it has taken possession of their bodies for much of their waking hours while attempting to control their thoughts. It is difficult to think of a more egregious violation of our founding principles. Yet it continues.  Perhaps  Justice Louis Brandeis' observation provides some insight into to why that is so:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

[forcedschool]

Local control of schools: the demise of an enduring myth

We are often told that a solution to the various problems of public schools is to "bring education back under local control."  Prior to the advent of the Common Core conflict, I had not infrequently encountered the argument that education is locally controlled. The folks that hold such a position are getting harder to find these days. In this brief essay, we will look at what this "local control" really is all about.

School districts are the governmental bodies that are supposed to provide the local control of education.  However, that control is extremely limited. For example, the Texas Education Code specifies the purpose of school districts:

The school districts and charter schools created in accordance with the laws of this state have the primary responsibility for implementing the state's system of public education and ensuring student performance in accordance with this code.

If you read the list of requirements and duties of school district board members, you will see that school districts are simply the local administrators of the state's policies - as we are told at the beginning of that Code section. They have virtually no important policy development role at all: no meaningful choices on curriculum, student attendance, total hours in the school year etc. They are essentially like the local soviets (councils) in the former Soviet Union. They provided an appearance of giving the proletariat a say in local governance but were, in fact, simply servants of the central communist party.

If the state is in control of education, then where does the state get its grand ideas about what must be taught? A recent post on the EdWeek blog titled Who Decides What is Taught in Our Schools? provides some clues as it relates to Common Core:

The "deciders" in the Common Core process were those who set the process in motion at the Gates Foundation and Department of Education, and the testing companies who were involved in crafting the standards so they would be testable.

The Gates Foundation, Pearson, the Department of Education, and a host of allied corporate reformers have dominated our classrooms long enough. This need NOT be a permanent state of affairs. It is time for students, teachers and parents to take back our schools.

The problem with the last statement is that parents have had almost no control of government schools since their establishment in the 19th Century.  In fact, that is one of the design features of the system. Public schools were created, in part, to distance children from the "superstitions" and "inferior" world views of their parents while creating a more uniform herd of employees to serve large corporate interests and provide docile taxpayers for an ever expanding government. [For evidence of these motives please see the three earlier posts regarding the history of public schooling: In the beginning, The Prussian model   and The resistance]

The current oligarchy of educrats (including private foundations, universities, teachers unions , the Dept. of Education and state education agencies) have controlled the important aspects of "public" school policies for many, many years.  It appears that the uproar over Common Core is simply because the federal government is in the driver’s seat.  I do agree that the federal government is exceeding its constitutional authority (through the backdoor in this case) but that problem is not the most fundamental issue. The individual states, through their compulsory education laws, have exceeded their legitimate authority for a very long time.

[forcedschool]

The resistance

This post is the third in a series that discusses the origins of the modern government schooling model.  The first is In the beginning: mostly voluntary and private and the second is The Prussian model.

Although modern education mythology characterizes the emergence of government-controlled schooling as a natural evolution embraced by the public, the reality is that parents resisted the new authoritarian Prussian model.  That resistance was due, in part, to the fact that it  really wasn't needed for educational purposes. 

E.G. West, in the The Spread of Education Before Compulsion, examined the state of education in New York state in the early 19th Century as reported by the superintendents of common schools for the state:

By this time the superintendents were expressing complete satisfaction with the provision of schooling. On the quantity of it the Report of 1836 asserted: "Under any view of the subject, it is reasonable to believe, that in the common schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age."

The fact that education could continue to be universal without being free and compulsory seems to have been readily acknowledged. Where there were students who had poor parents, the trustees had authority to release them from the payment of fees entirely, and this was done "at the close of term, in such a manner as to divest the transaction of all the circumstances calculated to wound the feelings of scholars."

When you explore the historical record, you will find that public schooling was imposed top down using the power of the state, driven by special interest groups with aggressive lobbying and marketing techniques. This can be seen in E.C. Cubberley’s classic book Public Education in the United States (originally published in 1934).  Cubberley was Stanford University’s first dean of its new School of Education (appointed in 1917) and was an enthusiastic supporter of our modern system of compulsory government education. Cubberley noted that the concept of  "state schools" was initially resisted and took many years of lobbying and "propaganda" (in his words) to overcome resistance from parents:

With many of the older citizens no progress could be made; the effective work everywhere had to be done with the younger men of the time. It was the work of many years to convince the masses of the people that the scheme of state schools was not only practicable, but also the best and most economical means for giving their children the benefits of an education; ...

Cubberley describes how "propaganda societies" were "organized to build up a sentiment for public education" in 1830’s and 1840’s:

For this work of propaganda hundreds of School Societies, Lyceums, and Educational Associations were organized; many conventions were held, and resolutions favoring state schools were adopted; many "Letters" and "Addresses to the Public" were written and published; public-spirited citizens traveled over the country, making addresses to the people explaining the advantages of free state schools; many public-spirited men gave the best years of their lives to the state-school propaganda; and many governors sent communications on the subject to legislatures not yet convinced as to the desirability of state action. At each meeting of the legislatures for years a deluge of resolutions, memorials, and petitions for and against free schools met the members.

Cubberly reveals that the compulsory attendance laws were strenuously opposed at first and he then summarizes how the system was imposed. It is also interesting to see how the expansion of government control over the lives of its citizens was a natural and necessary requirement to enforce compulsory school laws.

The history of compulsory-attendance legislation in the States has been much the same everywhere, and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous opposition. At first the laws were optional in character, and not infrequently required acceptance by vote of the cities or counties concerned before becoming effective. Later the law was made state-wide in application, but the compulsory period each year was short (ten to twelve weeks) and the age limits low (nine to twelve years). After this the struggle came to extend the time, often little by little, to include the entire period during which the schools are in session; to extend the age limits downward to eight and seven and upward to fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen; to make the law apply to children attending private and parochial schools as well as public schools, and to require co-operation from such schools in the enforcement of the law; to secure proper information as to the ages of children as a basis for enforcement; to require the appointment of attendance officers and the establishment of parental schools [special schools for habitual truants] for the proper handling of cases; to institute some state supervision of local enforcement; and to connect school-attendance enforcement with the child-labor legislation of the State through a system of working permits and state inspection of mills, stores, and factories. As a consequence the development of compulsory-attendance legislation has been very uneven in our States, and attendance laws in almost all the stages of legislative evolution may still be found.

Please see my post Resisting public schools in 1886: the work of Asst. Attorney General Montgomery for an example of one notable figure opposing the expansion of this model.

Most of the complaints we have about modern schools (lack of relevance to the student's life, lack of critical thinking and creative problem solving, focus on rote memorization tasks, harmful psychological effects etc.) were documented in Richard Grant White's 1880 essay, The Public-School Failure .

Before the concept of government-controlled schooling gained traction in America, William Godwin, an English political philosopher, raised concerns that are still applicable today. His Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was written in 1793. Godwin noted that learning needs to be self-directed rather than coerced:

It is our wisdom to incite men to act for themselves, not to retain them in a state of perpetual pupillage. He that learns because he desires to learn, will listen to the instructions he receives, and apprehend their meaning. He that teaches because he desires to teach, will discharge his occupation with enthusiasm and energy. But the moment political institution undertakes to assign to every man his place, the functions of all will be discharged with supineness and indifference.

He saw the inherent political conflict of interest:

…. the project of national education ought uniformly to be discouraged on account of its obvious alliance with national government. This is an alliance of a more formidable nature, than the old and much contested alliance of church and state. Before we put so powerful a machine under the direction of so ambiguous an agent, it behoves us to consider well what it is that we do. Government will not fail to employ it to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions. Their views as institutors of a system of education, will not fail to be analogous to their views in their political capacity: the data upon which their conduct as statesmen is vindicated, will be the data upon which their instructions are founded. It is not true that our youth ought to be instructed to venerate the constitution, however excellent; they should be instructed to venerate truth; and the constitution only so far as it corresponded with their independent deductions of truth.

Although there were many reasons why such an authoritarian system was seen as desirable by "educationists," politicians and industrialists at the time, perhaps some of the more important ones included the growing influence of positivism in the various elite institutions, the growth of factories and large corporations, and the perceived threat posed by the large numbers of immigrants coming from predominantly Roman Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy. Factors such as these caused certain leaders with various worldviews and political positions to seek more control over the growing "masses" to cure various perceived ills in society. "Scientific" management of children would produce citizens that would be happy to stay in their assigned stations in life, were obedient to the state and other authority figures, having uniformity in thought (for social order) and free from "superstitions" of the past. This required separating children from their parents for as much time as possible and placed under the supervision of the state's ostensible experts and their methodologies.

As we survey the current system of government-controlled schooling, we can safely say that the system has largely succeeded in achieving the original objectives. The fact that so few people question the model and those who do are viewed as dangerous heretics, demonstrates the system's effectiveness.

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The Prussian model

This is the second post in a series examining the origins of our government-controlled school system.  The first can be found here: In the beginning: mostly voluntary and private.   

Perhaps one of the most concise descriptions of how the 19th Century Prussian schooling system became a model for American schools can be found in the Wikipedia entry Emulation of the Prussian education system in the United States :

American educators were fascinated by German educational trends. In 1818, John Griscom gave a favorable report of Prussian education. English translations were made of French philosopher Victor Cousin's work, "Report on the State of Public Education in Prussia." Calvin E. Stowe, Henry Barnard, Horace Mann, George Bancroft and Joseph Cogswell all had a vigorous interest in German education. In 1843, Mann traveled to Germany to investigate how the educational process worked. Upon his return to the United States, he lobbied heavily to have the "Prussian model" adopted.

Mann convinced his fellow modernizers, especially those in the Whig Party to legislate tax-supported elementary public education in their states. Indeed, most northern states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers. In 1852, Mann was instrumental in the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Soon New York state set up the same method in 12 different schools on a trial basis.

That system was characterized by compulsory attendance, teacher colleges, standardized national tests, national age-graded curriculum, compulsory kindergarten, the fragmenting of concepts into separate subjects with fixed periods of study, and the state ultimately asserting a superior claim to the child over the rights of the parents. This was a radical departure in methodology and content from the successful traditional forms of education in America.

Educator John Taylor Gatto in The Underground History of American Education  describes Prussian thinking at the time:

The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience.

In The Prussian Elementary Schools, Thomas Alexander, Professor of Elementary Education at the George Peabody College for Teachers wrote the following in 1919:

We believe however that a careful study of the Prussian school system will convince any unbiased reader that the Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is to a large measure enslaved through the medium of his school that his learning instead of making him his own master forges the chain by which he is held in servitude; that the whole scheme of Prussian elementary education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety five out of every hundred citizens subservient to the ruling house and to the state.

Alexander’s book clearly documented  the totalitarian nature  of the Prussian model but, foreshadowing the intellectual myopia of today’s education establishment, he did not appear to see that an Americanized government-controlled education system would be only marginally better and would clearly contradict our founding principles.  

For some additional background on the Prussian system, see The Prussian-Industrial History of Public Schooling published by The New American Academy.

Given the top-down (i.e. forced)  introduction of a system that was so clearly antithetical to American values, one would expect some resistance.  Stay tuned for the next post to see how the system was imposed on an often unwilling populace.

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In the beginning: mostly voluntary and private

Most people have no idea how the modern school system evolved.  Some may think that compulsory public schools grew “organically” from the bottom up with parents demanding tax-supported public schools to be established for the good of their children and the nation. However, that is not the case. 

Early American education from 1776 through the early decades of the 19th century, could be characterized as being "decentralized, entrepreneurial, and driven by the demands of individual parents and local communities, not school districts or states."  Some form of education was  "a universal aspect in the lives of the majority of children by the early part of the nineteenth century," long before state compulsory attendance laws were enacted and public schools were the norm.

In Free to Learn, Boston College psychologist Peter Gray describes the educational environment in Europe and America at the time:

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, churches throughout Europe had been forced out of political power, and states began to take over the task of education of the young. The primary purpose of the new state-run schools was not literacy. By this time in history, the written word was everywhere, and literacy was high throughout Europe and North America. Children whose parents could read learned quite easily to read at home.

The primary educational concern of leaders in government and industry was not to make people literate but to gain control over what people read, what they thought , and how they behaved. Secular leaders in education promoted the idea that if the state controlled the schools, and if children were required by law to attend those schools, then the state could shape each new generation of citizens into ideal patriots and workers.

As Gray notes, prior to the advent of  compulsory public schools, literacy was quite high. Jack Lynch, of Rutgers University, addresses this topic in his article titled, "Every Man Able to Read," Literacy in Early America:

In 1974, University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge’s groundbreaking book, Literacy in Colonial New England, surveyed evidence from legal records and offered provisional conclusions—"The exercise is bound to be tentative, as it uses a biased sample and an ambiguous measure"—but he made the case that, among white New England men, about 60 percent of the population was literate between 1650 and 1670, a figure that rose to 85 percent between 1758 and 1762, and to 90 percent between 1787 and 1795. In cities such as Boston, the rate had come close to 100 percent by century’s end.

They showed that American literacy was high by European standards. As the University of Delaware’s F. W. Grubb wrote in 1990: Such research confirmed a widespread belief in early America itself. In 1800, a magazine called The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review reported that "no country on the face of the earth can boast of a larger proportion of inhabitants, versed in the rudiments of science, or fewer, who are not able to read and write their names, than the United States of America."

What about women? 

In some ways, though, the story of women’s literacy is more dramatic than men’s. As Bard College’s Joel Perlmann and Boston College’s Dennis Shirley write, "Half the women born around 1730 were illiterate; virtually all the women born around 1810 were literate." Though women lagged behind men chronologically, their progress came faster.

Even though it appears that the American approach to education that was predominately voluntary and private was working, the push for compulsory tax-supported government schools began in earnest in the 1830's.  However, contrary to the modern public school mythology of today, the concept of tax-supported public schools, known as "free common schools," was generally resisted by parents (evidence for this fact will be published in a subsequent post).

The first state to enact compulsory attendance laws in concert with a state-wide government school system was Massachusetts in 1852. It took 15 years before another state enacted such a law. By 1918 all states had them. This chart documents the enactment dates of compulsory school laws by state: State Compulsory School Attendance Laws.  The Massachusetts system, based on a model imported from Prussia, became the prototype "New England system."  That system was eventually adopted by every other state in the country.  Stay tuned for the next installment discussing the Prussian model.

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The STEM graduate shortage: science fiction as public policy

The classic problem with central planning of economies is that the planners have insufficient knowledge of everyone's needs and desires to rationally allocate resources. Therefore, they are often operating with faulty assumptions. An excellent example of this problem is the current focus of our federal government on producing more science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) graduates. The Office of Science and Technology Policy section of the White House website has this statement:

A world-class STEM workforce is essential to virtually every goal we have as a nation – whether it’s broadly shared economic prosperity, international competitiveness, a strong national defense, a clean energy future, and longer, healthier, lives for all Americans. If we want the future to be made in America, we need to redouble our efforts to strengthen and expand our STEM workforce.

Therefore, in its continuing effort to manage our economy and help us live “longer, healthier lives,” the federal government continues to spend large sums of our money promoting STEM education. The U.S. Government Accountability Office states that “in fiscal year 2010, 13 federal agencies invested over $3 billion in 209 programs designed to increase knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and attainment of STEM degrees.”

However, does this reported problem and its government solution correspond to reality?   According to a New York Times op-ed piece titled America's Genius Glut, “If anything, we have too many high-tech workers: more than nine million people have degrees in a science, technology, engineering or math field, but only about three million have a job in one. That’s largely because pay levels don’t reward their skills.”

A Washington Post article carried a similar story citing the same organization represented in the New York Times article : “A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.” That study, Guestworkers in the high-skill U.S. labor market, shows that “for every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.”

A recent article in the IEEE Spectrum, a journal of the “world's largest professional association for the advancement of technology,” provides a thorough examination of the myth and its sources and consequences. The article, titled The STEM Crisis Is a Myth, notes that

Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

The argument that we need more STEM graduates because we are “falling behind” dates back at least to the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (which was a reaction to the former USSR launching the first satellite). That initiative led to a glut of STEM graduates in the 1970's and the cycle has been repeated several times since then (see Piled Higher and Deeper for more historical context). The IEEE Spectrum article has this perspective:

Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95, 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57,000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India

Bill Mathis of the National Education Policy Center warns us of the implications of the current STEM “crisis”:

STEM as urban myth has several bad implications for education and social policy. First, it excites pressure to add even more science and math high school requirements -- even though they encourage the glut in an over-supplied field. (Common Core believers are pressing forward in science based on the myth). It also wastes educational resources teaching skills which most students will never use.

More importantly, the myopic concentration on higher, harder STEM skills for all students distracts us from the purposes of education and overshadows the true skills for the twenty-first century. These include things like communications, responsibility, teamwork, evaluating information, listening, negotiating and creativity.

Why has this myth been developed and promoted? One obvious reason is that it is useful in generating surpluses of STEM graduates which then helps suppress wages. The myth also creates the “necessity” of importing cheaper foreign STEM labor, further suppressing wages. It is also another excuse for the federal government to intervene and save us from the evil free market – which, by implication, is shown to be inadequate in serving our needs. One wonders how many people will be pushed into unsuitable career choices and will face painful decisions in the future because of this enduring propaganda.

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Free to Learn

The arguments for freedom of education are many. The focus of my concern is generally on the human rights aspects of compulsory government-controlled schooling, e.g. the clear violation of freedom of conscience that occurs when the state compels us to submit to its definition of "education" and then regulates and controls how that "education" is provided. There are also sociological, economic and political reasons why governments should not be entrusted with such awesome power over their citizens. However, it seems that those arguments are too esoteric for those of us that have not sufficiently recovered from our years of indoctrination by the system in question. I am hoping that Free to Learn, a new book by Peter Gray, psychology research professor at Boston College, will be received by many people as a compelling set of reasons to question, if not abandon, the existing model that has been imposed on our fair nation (and many others) for roughly 150 years. Fortunately, it is not a dry recitation of psychological research but an interesting and engaging look at how children naturally learn.

The subtitle of Free to Learn provides his basic positive argument: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. The book also has a basic negative argument: our system of schooling (public or private) is the antithesis of a healthy learning environment. I suspect that if we wanted to design a process that would destroy creativity and instill antipathy toward learning in our children, it would look very much like modern schooling.

 Gray argues that children’s play serves many critical purposes:

The drive to play is a basic, biological drive. Lack of free play may not kill the physical body, as would lack of food, air, water, but it kills the spirit and stunts mental growth. Free play is the means by which children learn to make friends, overcome their fears, solve their own problems, and generally take control of their own lives. It is also the primary means by which children practice and acquire the physical and intellectual skills that are essential for success in the culture in which they are growing.

However, our current system of education contradicts and inhibits our natural learning processes:

We are pushing the limits of children’s adaptability. We have pushed children into an abnormal environment, where they are expected to spend ever greater portions of their day under adult direction, sitting at desks, listening to and reading about things that don’t interest them, and answering questions that are not their own and are not, to them, real questions. We leave them ever less time and freedom to play, explore, and pursue their own interests.

Gray provides much evidence from research that supports his assertion that when children are “provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire the skills and confidence required to meet life’s challenges.”  When learning is allowed to happen naturally, “there is no need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, test, grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system of schooling.”

Gray notes the increasing intrusion of school into home and family life, where children have an increasing burden of homework and parents “are now expected to be teachers’ aides.”  But he also highlights a more insidious effect: “The school system has directly and indirectly, often unintentionally, fostered an attitude in society that children learn and progress primarily by doing tasks that are directed and evaluated by adults, and that children’s own activities are wasted time.”

Since Gray’s work has such profound implications about how we treat our children and, ultimately, order our society, all I can do on a blog post is provide a very brief survey of certain aspects of his book.  As Gray begins to tackle the existing education environment in this country, he poses this overarching question: “Is forced education – and the consequent imprisonment of children – a good thing or bad thing?”  As that question is considered, he provides “seven sins of our system of forced education.”

Sin 1: Denial of liberty without just cause and due process.

Sin 2: Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.

Sin 3: Undermining of intrinsic motivation to learn (turning learning into work).

Sin 4: Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating.

Sin 5: Interference with the development of cooperation and promotion of bullying.

Sin 6: Inhibition of critical thinking.

Sin 7: Reduction in diversity of skills and knowledge.

I must say he has nicely summarized the wonderful attributes of modern schooling. Those seven sins ultimately manifest themselves in increasing mental disorders in children. Gray documents the increases in anxiety and depression and its correlation with the decline in play and the increase in time devoted to schooling: “five to eight times as many young people today have scores above the cutoff for likely diagnosis of a clinically significant anxiety disorder or major depression than fifty or more years ago.” And: “Since 1950, the US suicide rate for children under age fifteen has quadrupled, and that for people age fifteen to twenty-four has more than doubled.”  He notes that these increases appear to have nothing to do with major external events (economic cycles, wars, etc.) but is likely linked to “the rise of external locus of control” (i.e. a sense of control by circumstances outside of the person) in young people.

Fortunately, he has many helpful positive observations and suggestions based on his own work and that of other research psychologists.  Since his research focuses on play and its educative value, Gray spends much time defining, describing and evaluating the various types of play as they relate to learning and social and emotional development. For example, he describes how “a playful mood improves creativity and insightful problem solving” and “a playful state of mind enables young children to solve logic problems.”  He also sees free age mixing as “a key ingredient for children’s capacity for self-education.” Obviously, all of the above are in conflict with our age-sorted factory-model schools.

Although the current education situation is very grim, he does not leave us without hope. As an alternative model, the Sudbury Valley School is examined in some detail. The school's website includes this statement:

Students enjoy total intellectual freedom, and unfettered interaction with other students and adults. Through being responsible for themselves and for the school’s operation, they gain the internal resources needed to lead effective lives.

Whether it is the spread of the Sudbury model or some other cooperative effort where there are the basic elements necessary for learning, he is optimistic that the migration to more humane and effective education environments will eventually prevail. However, it will have to come from parents. The current system is fundamentally so far off track, it can’t be reformed and, therefore, it must ultimately be abandoned.

When one reflects on the research and subsequent conclusions offered by Gray, it seems that at least some of what he reports should be self-evident from our own experience as children. In fact, as I read the book, I was reminded of George Orwell’s famous statement that “we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Fortunately, we have an intelligent psychologist who has given us much to ponder about what we are currently doing to our children.

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Freedom in education: a better way

A major thesis of this blog is that government should have little authority over education. The compulsory government-controlled education system that rules the minds of our children today can only be justified by a twisted view of our founding documents.  Courts have assumed that “public education” is a public good and a duty of the state. [See my post “Protection” against ignorance: the offer we can’t refuse.] Not only is it antithetical to our founding principles, it is also antithetical to true education.

What would be the long-term result of eliminating governmental compulsion in education?  Here are just a few of the many possible personal and societal benefits:

Centers of learning would be able to arise and compete in local markets.  Governmental control of curricula and education dollars effectively squeezes out real competition – competition that is truly innovative.  The solution is not simply privatizing public schools. We need to be open to the creation of entirely new learning environments (private, local and voluntary) that could evolve in a truly free market.  We do not have this now since all 50 states have arrogated unto themselves the authority to tell us what should be taught and when and how that should occur.  Just as we couldn't forecast the technological developments of this century, neither can we predict what learning environments may yet develop in a free market.

Education, in the historical understanding of that concept, could occur.  Dictionary.com defines education as “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.” Much of what passes for modern education is imparting mostly irrelevant information that is quickly forgotten (if ever learned).  True education is something that you acquire, not something externally imposed. The modern school system, being based on a mechanistic, assembly-line philosophy, is the antithesis of a natural learning environment.  Ken Robinson, education theorist and creativity guru provided this perspective in his 2010 TED Talks presentation:

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

There is little evidence to suggest that such a system will ever develop if it is under governmental control.

There would be a realistic chance of finding the right vocation.  We would all benefit by finding what Ken Robinson, calls the Element: “the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together.”  Incarcerating children in our rigid school system effectively prevents children from exploring the adult world. The existing impoverished view of education is ultimately wasteful from both an economic and a psychological perspective.  It is not uncommon for students to acquire a college degree in a discipline that they later realize is unsatisfying or unsuitable to them and sometimes leave that path soon after graduation. Others may spend decades working in a field that they will eventually have to abandon in order to preserve their mental health.  A real education (as opposed to "schooling") would help prevent such misallocations of time and resources.

Noted educator John Taylor Gatto, in Dumbing Us Down, the Hidden Curriculum of Public Schooling, made this observation:

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges, it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

Does that sound anything like what is found compulsory government schooling?