"Moreover, if your goal is to create citizens who support the collective, and you are not willing to take up arms, you adopt a Gramscian approach and slowly destroy the institutions of free association - of liberty and freedom. You attack the family, the church, etc., in a roundabout way. You employ the strategy of the indirect approach - you indoctrinate the youth. By doing so, you break the bond of parent and child without resorting to loud confrontations and street fighting. You simply use the classroom to define the state and its minions as maternal and paternal figures. Then, you sit back and allow subsequent generations - educated by the state - to chip away at the bedrock institutions over time. Sure, you have the occasional pitched fight, but these only serve as feints covering your flanking maneuvers. Your war is not one of attrition; it is one of subversion and time.
The conservative claims a liberal bias in education; they claim a liberal agenda. They are right. However, the conservatives only propose to force their bias on the liberals. The conservatives also have an agenda. Both groups seek to use government, and both are winning and losing at the same time. The issue is no longer individual versus the collective. The issue is now who has the power to educate and indoctrinate. Despite their rhetoric, most conservatives no longer stand for individual rights. In fact, these conservatives quickly drop the individual and champion the collective every time someone questions their cherished history. An evening listening to AM talk radio will prove that point: Liberals are teaching our children that Lincoln wasn't an American hero! That he didn't stand for liberty! Those folks are un-American! The conservative solution is for the government schools to force-feed conservative mythology to every parent's child, all in the name of liberty. Of course, the essence of the current liberal worldview is also the collective - the collective of Prussia and Bismarck, along with that of Marx, etc. It is a vision that easily melds with the state and its schools. And it is a vision that is not all that different from the conservatives'. While their respective messages are not the same, both groups subscribe to the state as the means and the collective as the ends. I asked this question above: Is it wrong - no, is it necessarily evil when a man has an agenda; when a man has a given end for which he will use some means to obtain? I answered in the negative. However, I need to return to that response once more. A man can employ any means that does not violate the property rights of others. Therefore, he cannot invade your property to state his message. In addition, he cannot use force to make you pay for his message either. Other than those two rules, everything else is fair game. Nevertheless, the so-called public schools violate both of those rules. Government has first claim to your children - this being true even if you home school - and will invade your property to deliver its message in the form of state-mandated curriculum and exams. Additionally, government and its schools have first claim to your income - your property. Their means is one of evil, as it is a means backed by government - the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion (Mises). Yes, I have an agenda, and so does government, its schools, and associated minions. Mine - no, ours is an agenda of liberty and peace while theirs is one of violence and control. Since we do not seek the violence of government to win the day, we have to educate to see our agenda through. We have much work left, but at the very least, we have the follies of government to use as our fool." http://www.lewrockwell.com/fedako/fedako12.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
