-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling
by Daniel Hager
[Daniel Haer is a writer in Lansing, Michigan]
When World War II ended, Congress authorized a tax
cut to take effect January 1, 1946. YoungAmerica, a
publication distributed through public schools, ran
an article in its December 13, 1945, issue
discussing the measure and presenting a brief history
of American taxation. The article concluded with a
section titled "Then & Now: Taxes Serve Us."
"One hundred years ago" the writer stated, "our
government helped the citizens by maintaining order.
It did little else. Its expenses were low, and so
taxes were low." He then quoted Benjamin Franklin's
observation in Poor Richard's Almanack in 1758:
"It would be a hard government that should tax
its people one-tenth part of their income." The
Young America writer continued, "In 1940, our
Federal, State and local governments taxed us
one-fifth of our incomes. But Franklin could not
have guessed the tremendous growth of this country."
(Emphasis in original.)
The writer then offered justification for such
high taxes: "As students, our young citizens are
given school buildings. Our government does
hundreds of things for us in our everyday life."
He finished with a quotation from Supreme Court
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "I like to
pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization."
The article vividly illustrates the overriding
intent of public schooling, which has always
been indoctrination of the young.
Who's in Charge?
Indoctrination itself is not illegitimate. In
fact, it is an intrinsic part of child rearing.
Out of love and concern, parents explicitly or
implicitly formulate desired outcomes for the
young lives they have created. Parents generally
hope their children will adhere to their own
traditions and belief systems, which they
attempt to inculcate.
The question parents must face is, "Who will
do the indoctrinating?" Schooling is an adjunct
to child rearing. The schooling options
available force parents to make decisions
regarding the level of autonomy they wish to
exercise. They retain the greatest control over
their children's developing beliefs by schooling
them at home. An alternative is to enroll their
children in an institution where they are certain
the indoctrination conforms to their own values,
such as a religious school.
When parents send a child to a tax-funded school,
they sacrifice their autonomy to alien interests.
The state has goals of its own that are distinct
from those of parents. Parents are able to
economize by availing themselves of a "free"
school, but the bargain is Faustian. The child
is subjected to indoctrination outside parental
control. The price of tax-funded schooling is
that parents give up their children to become
instruments of the state.
Under totalitarian regimes, the subjugation
of parental belief systems to those of the state
is blatant. Schoolchildren are propagandized into
the doctrines of the leadership, their thoughts
molded to the state's purposes.
But even under a "democratic" regime the
state operates manipulatively for its own ends.
Those who govern generally like to continue
governing. Their governance is more easily
maintained when the governed are passive and
docile. The state propaganda machine must
convince the citizenry of government's benevolence.
Schoolchildren are taught, as in the Young America
article, that government "gives" them things and
"does" things for them.
Government schools inevitably become battlegrounds
for control by ideological adversaries. The nature
of the indoctrination changes as advocates of
particular ideologies wax and wane in their power
to influence curricula. The constant is that parents
have relinquished direct control over what their
children are taught to believe.
This battle has been going on ever since the modern
public school emerged in the first half of the 1800s.
Education historian Joel Spring stated, "In the
Western world of the nineteenth century, various
political and economic groups believed that
government-operated schools could be a mechanism
for assuring the distribution of their particular
ideology to the population. In this sense, public
schools were the first mass medium designed to
reach an entire generation." [1]
Early Theocracy
Indoctrination through compulsory schooling originated
early in the nation's history. Massachusetts Bay Colony
was organized unabashedly as a theocratic government
that required citizens to adhere to stipulated religious
beliefs. In 1642 the Massachusetts General Court passed
an act requiring compulsory education of children and
giving town selectmen the authority to maintain
orthodox teaching and punish recalcitrant parents.
The civil government was in charge of the schools,
which were supported by taxes. R. Freeman Butts and
Lawrence A. Cremin wrote, "Here was the principle
that government had authority to control schools,
and it was well enunciated in the New England colonies
early in their histories. It was a principle of great
importance, for it set a precedent in American life
establishing the authority of the state to promote
education as a public and civil matter." [2]
However, private schoolmasters were in business
in Boston by the mid-1660s, according to records
examined by Robert Francis Seybolt. The number of
private teachers gradually enlarged to the end of
the seventeenth century, partly in response to
market demand. He wrote, "The two public schools
[in Boston] . . . admitted only boys who were at
least seven years of age and had learned to read.
Girls as well as boys were welcome, at any age,
in the private schools." [3]
In the 1700s in New England, Butts and Cremin noted,
private schools flourished as "colonial legislatures
showed a slackening of effort to require compulsory
education and gave greater freedom to private groups
to educate children in schools of their own
preference." [4]
A wide variety of curricula was offered in
eighteenth-century Boston private schools, Seybolt
found. "Unhampered by the control of the town meeting,
and little influenced by traditional modes of
procedure, these institutions were free to grow with
the town. This they did as conditions suggested it.
The result was a remarkably comprehensive program of
instruction which appears to have met every
contemporary educational need." [5]
Seybolt articulated the benefits of private sector
schooling. "The private schools were free to originate,
and to adapt their courses of instruction to the
interests of the students. The masters sought always
to keep strictly abreast of the time, for their
livelihood depended on the success with which they
met these needs. No such freedom or incentive was
offered the masters of the public schools." [6]
This principle was overwhelmed by the swelling tide
of nationalism of the early 1800s. Proponents of
common schools, or tax-funded elementary schools
requiring compulsory attendance, viewed them as
crucial vehicles for indoctrinating young people in
Americanism. The movement intensified as immigration
increased from continental European cultures that
lacked democratic traditions. Benjamin Labaree,
president of Middlebury College in Vermont, expressed
popular fears in an 1849 lecture before the American
Institute of Instruction. He asked,
"Shall these adopted citizens become a part
of the body politic, and firm supporters of
liberal institutions, or will they prove to
our republic what the Goths and Huns were to
the Roman Empire?" [7]
Wartime Indoctrination
Chauvinistic indoctrination becomes a useful tool
of the state in wartime, as when President Woodrow
Wilson created the Committee on Public Information
(CPI) to build support for American participation
in World War I and to blunt opposition by
constituencies with European roots. The nation's
high schools were prime propaganda targets and
received hundreds of thousands of copies of a CPI
produced pamphlet designed to stir anti-German
sentiment. "Germany does not really wage war," the
pamphlet stated. "She assassinates, massacres,
poisons, tortures, intrigues; she commits every
crime in the calendar, such as arson, pillage,
murder, and rape." [8] Joel Spring commented,
"From the standpoint of the public schools, [the
CPI] was the first major attempt to bring the goals
of locally controlled schools into line with the
policy objectives of the federal government?
An influential CPI official was William Bagley,
who "believed that local control of educational
policy was a major hindrance in adapting the
public schools to the needs of the United States
as a world leader.... The combination of the war
and the new national spirit opened the door for
the federal government to exercise leadership in
a national educational policy. Included in Bagley's
proposals was a call for federal financing of the
public school system. [10]
During the 1920s, local schools suffered for being
dominated by the wrong kinds of people on their
boards, according to publicschool champion George
S. Counts. His research showed that "for the most
part, [board members] are drawn from the more
favored economic and social classes. They are also
persons who have enjoyed unusual educational
advantages .... No longer is the ordinary American
community homogeneous as regards interests,
philosophy, and ideals. Hence the need of guarding
the integrity of the various minority groups. [11]
The laboring classes were expressing "lack of
confidence in the public school on the ground that
it is under the control of the great capitalistic
and employing interests." [12] As the high school
of that era evolved and expanded in curricula, he
noted, "the institution offers itself as a powerful
agency of propaganda to any group able to secure
dominion over it." [13]
Since then the dominion of the federal government
over schooling has grown to a scope of which Bagley
would approve. Its power, abetted by the activism
that the collectivist Counts advocated for teacher
organizations, enables it to be the leading
propagandist in educational policy.
But the nationalist Bagley would be disappointed
in the ideology that has accompanied the federal
growth. The current pre-eminent public-school
propaganda indoctrinates students in an
anti-nationalistic collectivist environmentalism.
Meanwhile, Counts's "capitalistic and employing
interests" attempt to reestablish influence
because so many products of public schools need
remediation before they can become employable.
Proponents of public schooling argue against the
complete privatization of schooling on the grounds
that the poor would not be able to afford tuition
and that some parents would not provide schooling
for their children, leaving them "uneducated."
However, the rampant levels of ignorance,
subliteracy, and hostility to learning that
characterize tax-funded schools argue that the
present system is itself not serving the best
interests of students.
Instead it is clear whose interests are being
advanced. Fifty-four years ago the writer in
YoungAmerica was moved to emphasize in italics
that era's apparently high tax rates. Since then
the average tax burden has doubled. Yet, as one
of my acquaintances has commented, "Americans
today are in a stupor." In other words, the
tax-supported school system has triumphed.
Americans are behaving exactly the way those
who govern desire them to behave.
Children who are turned over to the state become
molded by the state. Most parents cannot conceive
of a totally privatized alternative because they
themselves have been indoctrinated by public
schooling to believe in its alleged necessity.
However, it is fallacious for parents to think
that children can escape government schooling
without having their traditions and beliefs
subverted. "Free" schooling is seductively
attractive in the short run, but it has long-term
costs. The dismantling of tax-funded schooling
will not be accomplished until more and more
parents say, "My child does not belong to the
state."
1. Joel Spring, Images of American Life: A
History of ldeological Management in
Schools, Movies, Radio, and Television
(Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992), p. 2.
2. R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin,
A History of Education in American Culture
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953),
p. 103.
3. Robert Francis Seybolt, The Private Schools
of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1935), p. 9.
4. Butts and Cremin, p. 103.
5. Seybolt, p. v.
6. Ibid., p. 92.
7. Quoted in Butts and Cremin, p. 192.
8. Quoted in Spring, p. 25.
9. Ibid., p. 27.
10. Ibid., p. 21.
11. George S. Counts, The Social Composition of
Boards of Education (Chicago: The University
of Chicago, 1927), pp. 82, 97. See also Daniel
Hager, "Educational Savior?" The Freeman, June 1999.
12. Ibid., p. 86.
13. ibid., p. 91.
This article appeared in The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty
September 1999 for more information go to www.fee.org
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