Liberation from Educational Superstition
by Richard A. Cooper

Sheldon Richman contradicts the widely-held notion that the public schools are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. He disputes this notion not because he thinks there is nothing wrong with the public schools, but because he questions their origin and their nature. In this provocative and vitally important book he suggests that the schools are "doing precisely what they were designed to do or at least what they cannot help but do. Maybe we just do not like the results now that we see them."

The mindset of public schooling has succeeded in capturing the language used to describe it. As Richman points out, though, "public" and "private" are misleading labels, "We would advance the cause of clarity immensely if, instead, we called them the coercive and consensual sectors. The 'public' in 'public schools' is an Orwellian euphemism for coercive. Their money and their students are procured by force · Nevertheless, the term 'public school' is established, and this book will use it in the usual way." I can only add that surely one of the effects, if not one of the purposes of public schooling is to corrupt the language of thought and debate in this way.

Sheldon Richman holds a mirror up to the public schools and finds them wanting on several counts. What does Richman think education can and should be? "If we are to see the current system for what it is" he says, "we must have a new vision of what education should be. Education should be seen as a way of encouraging the child's natural curiosity. That change in focus automatically makes the child the active party in the enterprise." Richman's view of children developing themselves runs counter to what the originators, and the current practitioners, of public schooling have in mind. For the architects of public education in America viewed children as lumps of clay to be molded as they saw fit. Rather than encouraging curiosity, they wished to suppress it.

Why, then, was the public school system created? Richman provides chilling quotations to show that the purpose of this system, in the United States as elsewhere, is social engineering. Many mistakenly believe that this is something new. In fact, it goes back at least to Plato, the Greek forerunner of modern totalitarianism.

In our own day, social engineering is a game with many players, not just avowed big-government liberals. I should note yet another perversion of language at this point in my discussion, for the term "liberal" has come to mean a supporter of big government. It used to mean an opponent of the same. At any rate, such "liberals" are not alone. Neoconservatives don't want to replace or provide alternatives to the public schools, but would prefer to "reform" them, that is, to cast them in a neoconservative mold, to employ different engineers. The paleoconservatives complain most, and hypocritically, about "political correctness," but they also want to use the public schools to impose their own views. All factions play the very same game of power and social control.

If, then, schools are about social control and social engineering, it is not surprising that they have become battlegrounds. Culture wars are nothing new, they are part and parcel of a public school system. Evolution, religion, language, and sex education are only some of the examples of conflict arising from the public-school system and the winner-take-all nature of politics. Years ago I used to argue on behalf of the free-market system by likening to democratic voting. Now I know better. The free-market system is far superior to political organization of any sort. Markets turn a "minority" into a market niche! If you consider that the public school creators of the past and the public school proponents of today frequently praise public schools for fostering harmony and good citizenship, one discovers irony in how in fact they work. Public school board elections and meetings rarely demonstrate harmony and good citizenship! Even in the absence of explosive educational issues, public schools generate levels of nastiness, physical assaults, and irrational behavior that make the professional ice hockey circuit seem like one big Sunday School. Richman shows that this is not an accident, but a predictable result of government education.

The reader who wants to go beyond the obscuring propaganda of public schooling will benefit from Richman's spadework. Was there a problem with education before the enactment into law of public schools and compulsory education? Eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth century Americans devoured books and cherished reading. Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, sold 120,000 copies to the colonial population. I should point out an implication that even Sheldon Richman my friend, neglected. Common Sense was SOLD, it was not given away. Private schools abounded throughout the colonies and, later, the states of the new nation, conceived in liberty.

But the admirers of the Prussian system of government and the Prussian school system, such as Dr. Benjamin Rush and Horace Mann, had different ideas. So, too, did their Progressive successors, contemptuous as they were of individualism, immigrants, and initiative. Our public school systems and even our universities have largely ignored three significant historical points: that learning flowered without public schools, that the advocates of such schools were social engineers, and that this engineering from the start encountered principled opposition. Independent scholars such as Joel Spring, George Smith, E.G. West, Murrary Rothbard, and Joseph Peden have studied the opposition, but the establishment and its court intellectuals have ignored those studies. Sheldon Richman brings to light many heroic figures from this past, and discusses such more recent critics of the public schools as John Holt, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto.

Richman thinks that the much-touted alternative, school choice vouchers, is insufficiently radical. He contends that we need to discover new ways of doing things, inclusive of education, and that bureaucracy hampers this process. His is an optimistic view, and an alternative to the strife-ridden, mediocre, and anti-individual public-school system we have today.

"A free market in education would feature wide variety" he suggest, "the details of which cannot be foreseen. The entrepreneurial discovery process would have full rein, and people would be free to start and patronize any kind of school. A free market would unleash on behalf of education the creativity that is evident in high technology and other areas of the marketplace. The clash over values that has been fought out in the public schools would end; parents and children would decide for themselves what kind of moral and intellectual education is appropriate."

We all want better schools. If we want better schools that serve the needs of children, parents, teachers, and others, we must break free from the imposed designs of decades and champion Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families. Richman's book liberates all of us, not just families, from public school superstition.

(Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families can be ordered from The Future of Freedom Foundation, 11350 Random Hills Road, Suite 800, Fairfax, VA 22030)