It's probably wise to preface this with the disclaimer that, yes, I know there are many fine and dedicated educators within the government schools. It is not with them that I have the bone to pick, it's with the institution itself.
You want to know why I'm so dead set against government involvement in education? This sort of thing is part of the reason:
Since Plato's Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of "capturing" children for social-engineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state. Hitler--who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth--once remarked, "When an opponent says 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.'" Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educatior was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. "There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day," the feminist icon proclaimed, "than this new thought about the child...the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership--the unchecked tyranny...of the private home."
Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that "the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family." The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning "fun," "relevant," and "empowering." The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.
What really weirds me out is that an awful lot of the people who are right with me on small-government everything-else-in-the-universe just go totally slack when it comes to government education. It's like the information just doesn't
process. People have this sentimental attachment for the schools; in their minds, government schools go back to the founding of the republic and are responsible for the greatness of this country
(Where did they get this idea? Could be from the government schools, which, of course, have every reason in the world to perpetuate their own existence?). The reality is that government schools as we know them now did not come into existence until quite a long time after the country's founding and have been--intentionally, from the very beginning--an instrument of
indoctrination. It doesn't really matter to me that the indoctrination has been seen as a way to turn Irish Catholic immigrants into Protestants, or Americans into compliant company drones. It's that the whole system is, and has been for longer than just about any of us have been alive, set up to
indoctrinate. The only question is, "Who holds the reigns?"
To my mind, when people argue that we should "reform" government education, what they are saying is, "I want to hold the reigns, I want to determine the content of the children's indoctrination." They never argue that we should just get rid of a system that was designed from the beginning to indoctrinate.
And you people line up to send your kids to
that? I know I sound harsh. I'm sorry. But you gotta be woofin' me.
You can order your copy of
Liberal Fascism here.Labels: government, government education, public education, public indoctrination
