Today’s school-aged parents are parents of my generation. We’re accustomed to changing technology—at least in our adult lives. Sometimes however, we seem to recollect our own childhood education experiences as the continuing norm when that just isn’t so. When we were school-aged, we went from a period of no public internet to dial-up internet. Our idea of research was to randomly browse a ProQuest archive for as long as it took to find something relevant, because searching was an emerging art. This isn’t the world today, and we should stop acting like it where our children are concerned.

I’m not an expert, but I am a parent. I’m a parent who cares about and is committed to my children’s success. I’m one of many who have been on the fence about, but am now leaning towards and preparing for homeschooling. In exploring this idea and making preparations to execute it, here are some of my findings.

Homeschooled kids have largely been stereotyped as being socially awkward and not prepared to handle the real world. However a new Harvard study has found exactly the opposite; Homeschooled kids are more well adjusted and engaged than their public schooled peers. This is because homeschooled kids are more self-sufficient, and thrive on how to think than what to think.

If you think as a parent you are unfit to teach your children, this is merely a confidence problem you have to overcome, rather than an ability problem. This is especially true since we live in the age of information, whereas the self learning experience is a far cry from what it was when we experienced gradescool. 

Where exactly are your kids with education? How do you know where to start? The easiest answer is simply to let your kids show you.

For literacy, start with your child journaling. Whether a real journal about their day, or imaginative stories, they’ll show you exactly where they are. The words they misspell are their challenge words. They clearly know what the word means if they’ve used it accurately in context, so now it’s time to teach them how to spell it. Then it’s time to teach them similar words, and their meanings, that follow the same spelling rules while you’re on that theme. Then teach them a few alternate synonym word choices to that word. Encourage them to use these new words in their future writing. You’re creating a literacy web, while you should be challenging them to expand.

Once you have expanded literacy, you’ve given them the opportunity to learn whatever they would like if you have fostered an environment of curiosity. Raise a self starter and they will learn.

Mathematics is a challenge for me, but lucky for me I’m good with money. Coincidentally, money is a great way to introduce any mathematical concept visually all the way up to Pre Algebra. Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Decimals, Fractions and Percentages can all be visually taught with pocket change. It’s crucial to visually teach these concepts with real world tangibility before moving to written mathematics. Teaching the “why behind the what” with something as motivating as money is a great way to introduce new concepts. As for that later Algebra stuff… well, I have a few years to figure that out.

If you’re still stuck on the social aspect part, then there’s a good chance that you’re actually shallow and you should work on that. You weren’t really socialized so much as you were part of a hierarchy, and lucky you for not having been at the bottom of that hierarchy like I was. Getting pushed didn’t do much for me socially. Getting a concussion in a classroom only to have the school lie to my father about it (zero tolerance bullying) didn’t do much for me socially. Getting put in choke holds in the locker room didn’t do much for me socially.

Sunday school did a lot for me socially. If it weren’t for Sunday School, I’d be far worse off socially. If public school is where I gained my social skills, I’d probably be a psychopath right now. I understand religion is a debatable topic in libertarian circles, but community churches certainly engage in the community service and voluntarism that libertarians espouse. Sunday School is where these concepts were introduced to me and where I first engaged in them. 

Regardless of how one feels about religion, your child will fare far better socially by going to Sunday School than public school. Or any club or sports team. There are far more beneficial ways for your children to learn constructive social skills than public school. Even just a few short hours a week of constructive social activities far outweigh hours long days of public school where kids are exposed to negative behaviors and interactions. Even the kids who bully other kids aren’t getting anything positive socially, because that behavior won’t get them far in the real world, even though schools effectively enable it by pretending it doesn’t happen.

All in all, you as a parent are your child’s best teacher. There are resources out there to help you that didn’t exist when you were your child’s age. If you are committed, your children will be better off learning from you. 

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Homeschool is just that. It’s home and school. It should sound ideal. All the comforts of home. With all the benefits of education—the exploring, the discoveries, the flourishing. 

Instead, for many families it sounds like stress. Lots and lots of stress. 

It doesn’t have to. You can make the flourishing happen. You can kick the stress to the curb. The trick is to let your children take ownership in their own education. Put them in charge and see what happens.

Does that sound crazy? Maybe. But consider this. Is it any more crazy than working overtime to replicate a school setting in your home, complete with miniature desks, homework assignments, and rigorous schedules? If you’re not sending your kids to school “out there,” clearly a traditional school environment isn’t, for whatever reason, meeting your family’s needs. Why break your neck trying to turn your basement family room into an in-home remake of a public school classroom?

Instead, spend your time exploring one of the primary benefits of homeschooling—tailor make an education based on your kids’ interests. Foster their love of learning and curiosity about the world. Radically re-envision what educating children looks like. You can do it.

First—ask your kids what they want to learn about this year. Find out what truly interests them, not what they’ve been told they need to know. What subjects have they have always wanted explore and learn more about? 

Second—listen with integrity. When you grant your children liberty and agency in their education, as a parent it’s your job to listen to them, to really hear them, and then act on what they’re saying. If your kindergartener is passionate about trains, then study trains. If your third-grade son wants to learn about the stars, then study astronomy. If your ninth grade daughter is obsessed with fashion, then study fashion. 

You’ll soon see that learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

Third—integrate their interests into the curriculum. Trains can be counted, which means they’re math. The Little Engine that Could is reading. Making a miniature steam engine is science, and learning about how trains changed the world is history. The same pattern of interconnectedness works for astronomy—and even fashion.

When your sixth grader wants to learn sew, buy her a sewing machine and fabric. She’ll soon be a whiz at fractions. Then when that same young woman is in high school and wants to start an Etsy shop featuring her clothing designs, you’ll help her start her own small business!

Homeschool parents quickly realize the challenge they face isn’t so much being a teacher (because heaven knows we don’t know everything) as it is being a facilitator or mentor helping kids figure out how they can learn what they want to learn and become their most authentic selves.

Convey the idea that education is not about pleasing an authority (be it mom and dad, or the government). It’s about your student’s life–with all the responsibilities and consequences. It’s a first-class ticket to independence, autonomy, and emotional flourishing—first as small children, then as teenagers, and eventually as adults who are comfortable living and working in the world, interacting with people of all ages. 

Will your homeschool kid’s education look like a traditional education? I certainly hope not. Will there be holes in their education? Undoubtedly. (There were definitely holes in my public high school education.)

Allowing kids active agency in their education plays into the boundless curiosity all children have. Nurture that curiosity throughout their at-home education, and they will remain curious throughout their lives. They’ll be armed with the knowledge that they can teach themselves (or find someone to teach them) what they want to learn or need to know. 

And—most importantly—they’ll be ready to meet the world head-on, filled with passion and accountability.

Gina Prosch educates her children at home in Mid-Missouri. She is also a homeschool life coach (and parent) who blogs and shares homeschool resources at www.TheHomeschoolWay.com. She is also the co-host of The OnlySchoolers Podcast. 

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While we can all agree this is a complicated situation, many of the nation’s public schools went with a one-size-fits-all solution. The problem is that one size never fits all.

Schools across the US chose to begin the 20/21 school year with remote ‘learning’, or ‘virtual schooling’. This settles some minds, as it would mean students would mostly do school work online rather than on campus; it also leaves parents trying to juggle work and being a teacher. Many parents are feeling frustrated and confused by the plethora of programs students must use. Although students would not be on campus in this scenario, teachers would teach from their classrooms, in many cases.

Another solution many schools went with was a hybrid schedule. This schedule splits students into groups. Each group does some remote learning and some in-person learning. The hybrid schedule lacks stability and routine. While many like to answer with “school is not daycare,” there are many families struggling to make ends meet. Not all jobs offer the flexibility it takes for kids to go to school some days and not others. This has left parents feeling hopeless and some have even lost their jobs trying to figure it out. Teachers are still exposed to the same students just as with a normal in-person schedule, just on different days of the week. This is senseless. Kids are struggling. Parents are struggling. Even Doctor Cade Brumley admitted that he can’t help but think hybrid and remote learning are not completely successful.

While in-person learning seems ideal, most of the schools allowing it have implemented guidelines that destroy all sense of normalcy. Some schools have mandated masks for all grades. Imagine being five years old and uneasy about your mom dropping you off to strangers for the first day of kindergarten. She is not allowed to walk you to your class. As you exit the car, you are taken by people you have never met. They are all wearing masks. They immediately put a temperature gun in your face. You make your way to your classroom. While you may be upset or nervous, you have to keep a distance. There is no comforting hug. You cannot even see a reassuring smile. Can you imagine how frightening and lonely this must feel?

Some schools have not mandated masks for younger students. They recognized the unrealistic expectation that would come with younger children being forced to keep their faces covered at all times. One school in Louisiana had students walking with their arms out like zombies to keep a distance from other students.

Unfortunately, the majority of schools also insist teachers wear masks. This puts students struggling with speech at a disadvantage, hindering students who may not qualify for therapy, but still depend on seeing the mouth to understand a word and how to pronounce it. Masks are a disservice to anyone who struggles with hearing. Communication is an important part of social and emotional development, but it does not seem as if these things were considered before guidelines were written.

Not only are children having to accommodate the fear mongering of the adults by wearing masks and being treated as lepers, but they are also missing out on important things such as graduation, prom, dances, ring ceremonies, and sports.

While there are many sports in high school, football is front and center right now. States already allowing students to play include Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Alabama. States that should be playing soon include Kentucky and South Carolina. Louisiana, however, is not playing and had a hearing about it on September 4th.

(Update: it was decided that Louisiana schools would move up the start of the football season to Oct. 1-3.)

One concerned citizen is Shane Evans. Not only is he a father who was once a coach himself, but he is the Chief of Investigations for the East Baton Rouge Coroner’s Office. In a letter to the members of the Louisiana House Committee on Education, he explained that the data “does not connect high school sports with serious illness or death due to Covid, but it is clear that taking our kids out of contact with their coaches and competition is detrimental”. As the letter indicates, the date does show that teen homicide victims have more than doubled so far in comparison to last year. It also shows 90 overdose deaths between January 1 and September 3 of 2019, whereas 2020 year-to-date is already at 166 with several pending toxicology.

Shane Evans continued “I hope they understand, if they cancel football, those kids are still going to gather on the weekends”. While some may not understand the importance of staying in shape and the discipline kids get from sports, Shane Evans hit the nail on the head when he added that sports “keep kids out of trouble”.

Countless parents have decided that the things being advertised as ‘The New Normal’ simply are not normal enough. Pictures have been circulating on social media of children spaced out in lunchrooms, masks on playgrounds, and students having to play alone if at all. This ‘new normal’ does not allow the “socialization” people give public schools credit for. If masks work well enough to mandate them, things should be otherwise normal. Instead of striving for a sense of ‘normalcy’, decisions were made without considering how students are impacted by Covid. There has been little to no data on what emotional and mental impact these guidelines will have on children. The majority of these decisions were made by people not involved in these children’s lives or even the communities they live in.

Sadly, even the most concerned parents have had no say. In Louisiana, when it came to parents trying to speak up for their children, they were told to mask up or get out (1:38:36). I was one of those parents who showed up at committee hearings to speak on behalf of my child who struggles with speech. Wearing a mask to explain how masks will not work in certain situations would have taken away from the point being made. A mask would have hindered an attempt to show those present how words are formed, and how even adults rely on seeing the mouth when listening to someone speak. Even when we offered to socially distance, we were told to put on a mask or leave. Instead of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education listening to the concerns of parents, they had us escorted out by six officers (1:41:06). The meeting continued and the guidelines were approved, including mandating masks in schools.

On the KWOS Morning Show, Nancy Pendergrass mentioned that a Missouri survey showed that 70% were in favor of in-person schooling. Even still, that district went to virtual learning. These things were decided out of fear that students would spread Covid-19 to teachers. This is another example of how decisions were made without considering the children or those funding these schools—the taxpayers.

Reason Foundation’s Director of School Choice, Corey A. DeAngelis, has shared polls and studies showing a rather large shift from public school to other options such as home school, private school, and micro school.

One county in Florida that refused in-person learning had an enrollment drop of about 7,600 students. Dallas, Texas has seen enrollment drop about 3.6 percent from last year. Corey A. DeAngelis went on to share other polls/surveys showing national numbers. One showed home school doubling from 5% to 10%. The Gallup numbers DeAngelis shared showed public school enrollment dropping from 83% to 76%. As he explained in his post, this would be about 3.5 million leaving public school. While there are undoubtedly numerous reasons for this shift, one cannot ignore the fact that a lot of parents are simply fed up.

With all that is going on, a few phrases we often hear are, “please be patient”, “everything is subject to change”, and “this is a fluid situation”. Yet, they have shown zero patience and understanding for parents and students. Communities are asked to fund, support, and sing the praises of school systems that refused to consider their legitimate concerns.

As our government tries to force their “New Normal” on families, it seems parents are choosing their own “New Normal”. Parents have gone with the flow for too long. They have put faith in a system that has put their children last. Students have become nothing more than money signs sitting in a desk—and they can’t even sit in the desks anymore.

The only way parents will be heard is by removing their students from public schools and shrinking their funding. Money talks. It will be interesting to see what school looks like over the next few years. What will it really mean when we hear the phrase “school is back in session”?

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This comes on the heels of several states closing down all public schools, with many school districts making similar decisions at the local level across the country.

As parents prepared themselves for a new reality of educating their own children at home, #homeschooling began trending on Twitter, Monday. Moms and dads were sharing their plans, checklists, schedules, resources, successes, and ‘failures’ on this first day of the school week. And all the while, veteran homeschoolers were like –

Some parents were very organized in their approach, with colorful, structured schedules (god bless ‘em).

Others were slightly less formal, but still with a good (if not somewhat vague) plan laid out.

Still others tried more of a non-traditional curriculum plan, only to be vetoed by their spouse… (This didn’t sound so bad to me – there are learning opportunities in nearly everything!)

Only a few short hours in, many parents were confronted with the varied challenges that come with homeschooling.

Teachers (parents) rejoiced in their successes, as well (we’ll see how they feel in another week).

The freedom for parents to choose how to educate their children has been an ongoing battle. It was most recently brought to the forefront when Reason Foundation’s Corey DeAngelis caught former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on video lying about sending her children to public schools. He has continued to call out Republican and Democrat officials alike for their hypocrisy in fighting against school choice while sending their own children to private schools. Parents from all walks of life continue to lobby their state legislatures for more education choices.

Perhaps a good that will come out of this coronavirus pandemic that has upended life as we have known it in America will be the realization that government schools are not the only and certainly not the best option for our children. Each child deserves the opportunity to be educated in the way that works best for them, whether that be homeschool, private school, charter school, public school, or any other number of options. The ‘schooling’ is unimportant. What is important is that they be given every opportunity to learn.

Whether you are a veteran homeschooler or a #coronaquarantine parent teaching your child at home for the first time, go check out the #homeschool posts on Twitter. You will laugh, be encouraged, and find a treasure trove of support and resources.

Whether your homeschool looks like this:

Or like this:

The important thing is that you do you. We all learn differently and you do what works best for you and your children. A child who is taught to love learning will never stop learning. And that is the best lesson you can teach them.

The post Coronavirus Effect: We Are All Homeschoolers Now appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Mass compulsory schooling has become such a cornerstone of contemporary culture that we forget it’s a relatively recent social construct. Responding to the pandemic, the United Nations declared that “the global scale and speed of current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education.”

We have collectively become so programmed to believe that education and schooling are synonymous that we can’t imagine learning without schooling and become frazzled and fearful when schools are shuttered. If nothing else, perhaps this worldwide health scare will remind us that schooling isn’t inevitable and education does not need to be confined to a conventional classroom.

Mass Schooling Is a New Idea

For most of human history, up until the mid-19th century, education was broadly defined, diversely offered, and not dominated by standard schooling. Homeschooling was the default, with parents assuming responsibility for their children’s education, but they were not the only ones teaching them.

Small dame schools, or nursery schools in a neighbor’s kitchen, were common throughout the American colonial and revolutionary eras; tutors were ubiquitous, apprenticeships were valued and sought-after, and literacy rates were extremely high. Public schools existed to supplement education for families that wanted them, but they did not yet wield significant power and influence.

The Puritan colonists’ passed the first compulsory education laws in Massachusetts Bay in the 1640s describing a state interest in an educated citizenry and compelling towns of a certain size to hire a teacher or to open a grammar school. But the compulsion rested with towns to provide educational resources to those families who wanted them, not with the families themselves.

Historians Kaestle and Vinovskis explain that the Puritans “saw these schools as supplements to education within the family, and they made no effort to require parents actually to send their children to school rather than train them at home.” This all changed in 1852 when Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory schooling statute, mandating school attendance under a legal threat of force. Writing in his book, Pillars of the Republic, Kaestle reminds us: “Society educates in many ways. The state educates through schools.”

Society Without Schooling

We already have glimpses of what education without schooling can look like. When the Chicago teachers’ strike shut down public schools for 11 days last October, civil society stepped up to fill in the gaps.

Community organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club opened their doors during the daytime to local youth, the aquarium and local museums offered special programming, church and religious organizations welcomed young people with tutoring and enrichment activities, public libraries and parks were populated with families, and the federal school lunch program continued to nourish children in need.

This same pattern repeats itself during summer school vacation each year, with various community organizations, local businesses, and public spaces such as libraries and parks offering educational and recreational experiences for young people.

The idea that children and adolescents need to be enclosed within a conventional school classroom in order to learn is a myth. Humans are hard-wired to learn. Young children are exuberant, creative, curious learners who are passionate about exploration and discovery. These qualities do not magically disappear with age. They are routinely smothered by standardized schooling.

As Boston College psychology professor and unschooling advocate, Peter Gray, writes in his book, Free To Learn:

Children come into the world burning to learn and genetically programmed with extraordinary capacities for learning. They are little learning machines. Within their first four years or so they absorb an unfathomable amount of information and skills without any instruction. . . Nature does not turn off this enormous desire and capacity to learn when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling.

As humans increasingly coexist with robots, it’s crucial that young people retain and cultivate the imagination, ingenuity, and desire for learning that separate human intelligence from its artificial antipode. These qualities can be ideally nurtured outside of a standardized, one-size-fits-all school classroom where children and adolescents are free to pursue their interests and develop important skills and knowledge, while being mentored by talented adults in their communities.

An example of this type of learning is a series of spring daytime classes for homeschoolers at a makerspace in Boston offering up to nine hours of content each week in topics ranging from architecture and design to STEM science and art, taught by trained engineers, scientists, and artists. These are the types of high-quality educators and learning experiences that can and do flourish when we seek and support education without schooling.

In addition to its health scare, coronavirus has triggered widespread fear about how children can be educated when they can’t go to school. Despite the fact that mass compulsory schooling is a relic of the industrial age, its power and influence continue to expand. Perhaps some families will now discover that education outside of standard schooling is not only nothing to fear but may actually be the best way to learn in the innovation era.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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A recent example of this was an NPR story that aired last week with the headline, “How Should We Regulate Homeschooling?” Short answer: “We” shouldn’t.

Learning Outside of Schools Is Safe

The episode recycled common claims in favor of increased government control of homeschooling, citing rare instances in which a child could be abused or neglected through homeschooling because of a lack of government oversight. Of course, this concern ignores the rampant abuse children experience by school teachers and staff people in government schools across the country.

Just last month, for example, two public school teachers in California pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a student, a public school teacher in New Mexico was convicted of sexually assaulting a second grader after already being convicted of sexually assaulting two fourth graders, two public school employees in Virginia were charged with abusing six, nonverbal special needs students, and the San Diego Unified School District in California is being sued because one of its teachers pleaded guilty to repeated sexual abuse and intimidation of a student.

Child abuse is horrific, regardless of where it takes place; but the idea that government officials, who can’t prevent widespread abuse from occurring in public schools, should regulate homeschooling is misguided. Many parents choose to homeschool because they believe that learning outside of schooling provides a safer, more nurturing, and more academically rigorous educational environment for their children. The top motivator of homeschooling families, according to the most recent data from the US Department of Education, is “concern about the environment of other schools.” Being regulated by the flawed government institution you are fleeing is statism at its worst.

Homeschooling Is Growing

Brian Ray, Ph.D., director of the National Home Education Research Institute, offered strong counterpoints in the otherwise lopsided NPR interview, reminding listeners that homeschooling is a form of private education that should be exempt from government control and offering favorable data on the wellbeing, achievement, and outcomes of homeschooled students.

Homeschooling continues to be a popular option for an increasingly diverse group of families. As its numbers swell to nearly two million US children, the homeschooling population is growing demographically, geographically, socioeconomically, and ideologically heterogeneous. Homeschooling families often reject the standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum frameworks and pedagogy of public schools and instead customize an educational approach that works best for their child and family.

With its expansion from the margins to the mainstream over the past several decades, and the abundance of homeschooling resources and tools now available, modern homeschooling encompasses an array of different educational philosophies and practices, from school-at-home methods to unschooling to hybrid homeschooling. This diversity of philosophy and practice is a feature to be celebrated, not a failing to be regulated.

The collective “we” should not exert control over individual freedom or try to dominate difference. “We” should just leave everyone alone.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: Flickr

The post “We” Should Not Regulate Homeschooling appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Walt Whitman’s Criticisms of “Fallen” America

The fears and concerns about social conditions and their solutions heard today have been expressed many a time in the past, both more distant and closer to our own time. For instance, the famous 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92) expressed such disenchantment about the United States in his 1871 essay, Democratic Vistas:

Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States.… The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official [government] services of America are saturated with corruption, bribery, falsehood, and maladministration.

Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theater, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity — everywhere an abnormal libidinousness … with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, probably the meanest to be seen in the world.

In spite of America’s industrial achievements, the rising standards of living, the opportunities for the less well off to better themselves, and the prevailing spirit of freedom and individual autonomy, America was enveloped with cultural decay and spiritual stagnation, Whitman forlornly said. Not too surprisingly, he called for a social and cultural renaissance in America through the emergence of great novelists and poets, who would capture and inspire a higher and truer and more virtuous path for America. They would highlight the heroism, the goodness, and the greatness of Democratic America, properly understood.

Whitman’s Better America and Political Paternalism

But he was too impatient to wait for these things to fully come on their own through literature and culture, appropriately inspired. A better and more virtuous America required the middle class being broadened to include more of those currently among the poor. A more active religious sentiment and practice as the ultimate foundation for America needed to be cultivated, along with love for and dedication to “the Union” to be fostered and reinforced all across the country (after all, it was only six years since the end of the Civil War). A unified and created nationalist spirit was essential.

Whitman offered no full central plan about how to ensure America being on a renewed path to “greatness,” but he made it clear that while Democracy (always in the essay with a capital “D”) was the “divine” and moral order for humanity, most especially in the United States, a free society could only be trusted with freedom when the proper values and virtues had been developed among the population.

As long as “the people” (what Whitman called God’s “divine aggregate”) was lacking in the needed qualities for free citizenship, political paternalism would have to rule over them until they were ready to democratically rule themselves. Or as Whitman expressed it: “That until the individual or community show due signs of [democratic self-ruling maturity], or be so minor or fractional as not to endanger the State, the condition of authoritative tutelage may continue, and self-government must abide its time.”

Whitman’s Program for Remaking the American People

What Whitman did call for was a “program” to be established for all Americans, to lead them to that higher level of true Democracy:

I should demand a program of Culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the West, the workingmen, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women, and of a grand and powerful motherhood. I should demand of this program or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area.

Out of this would come a new and better American Man. This program and agenda to make and keep America great would have to include the physical training of a superior breed of people. Said Whitman:

To our model a clear-blooded, strong-fibred physique, is indispensable; the questions of food, drink, air, exercise, assimilation, digestion, can never be intermitted.

Out of these we descry a well-begotten Selfhood in youth, fresh, ardent, emotional, aspiring, full of adventure; at maturity, brave, perceptive, under control, neither too talkative nor too reticent, neither flippant nor somber; of the bodily figure, the movements easy, the complexion showing the best blood, somewhat flushed, breast expanded, an erect attitude, a voice whose sound outvies music, eyes of calm and steady gaze, yet capable also of lashing and a general presence that holds its own in the company of the highest.

Whitman spoke of building a nation of persons imbued with a “Personality” of “Individuality.” But all of his new American individuals end up being cookie-cut from the same mental and physical mold. This renewed America, with new man (and woman), would be designed according to Walt Whitman’s imagination. In addition, the United States needed “future religious forms, sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes, &c., [all of] a compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles.” Walt Whitman seemed to want a peculiar individualism of national conformity in mind and body.

Hazony’s Call for Tradition and Rejection of “Rationalism”

A recent variation on the same theme is the call for a new national conservatism that rejects both the relativist multiculturalism of “the left” and what is called a “rationalist liberalism” that rejects a needed American traditionalism. It is summarized in a lecture delivered at Harvard University in April 2019 by Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), the president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, Israel.

Hazony argues “Conservative Rationalism Has Failed” (part 1 and part 2). In essence, he wishes to see a political, economic, and cultural turn away from the ideas and influences of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Rationalism, individualism, the free market, and religious skepticism in America and the West, in general, have become socially decadent, culturally immoral, and philosophically foundationless due to the rejection of traditionalism as the basis of belief, values, and institutions, all of which rely upon certain religious ideas and dogmas, Hazony argues.

American conservatism went astray in the post–World War II period by eschewing the sacred and basing its case for a free and good society on “reason.” Says Hazony:

What were once linchpin concepts such as family and nation, man and woman, God and Scripture, the honorable and the sacred, have been found wanting and severely damaged, if not overthrown. The resulting void has been filled by new doctrines, until now mostly neo-Marxist or libertarian in character. But a racialist “white identity” politics in a Darwinian key is gathering momentum as well.

All three of these approaches to political and moral questions are, in a sense, creatures of the Enlightenment, claiming to be founded on a universally accessible reason and to play by its rules. This is another way of saying that none of them have much regard for inherited tradition, seeing it as contributing little to our understanding of politics and morals.

He also rejects the founding premises in the Declaration of Independence on the “natural rights” of each and every individual, “a kind of official ideology of the state” that he considers misplaced and dangerous for America. He argues that rationalists of every stripe presume that “reason” has the capacity and ability to create society, mold it into any desired shape, and transform the human condition. Hazony considers this misplaced.

Religion and Tradition Back in Public Schools

Society is the long and cumulative product of human experience that has emerged out of the contributions of countless generations. Traditions capture the wisdom of the ages, while the current generation, cutting itself off from all that historical humanity has learned, has nothing to go by but the reality of its own time, which is a mere slice of mankind’s time on this planet. Relying on what the reasoning minds of the current generation can know and with the arrogance that that is sufficient to design society has resulted in the conflicts, contradictions, and tyrannical presumptions of those such as the politically correct multiculturalists and identity-politics warriors.

The acceptance by conservatives of this “liberal rationalism,” Hazony warns, has brought about the loss of religion in society, reflected in the banishing of religion from the government school system and the public square in general. Thus, America and the West have become increasingly godless societies. Earlier in American history and politics, Hazony wistfully reminds his audience, religion was a central part of the political; now it has all but disappeared.

So what does Yoram Hazony want? He wants to reinstate religion, most importantly, within the public school system and as a mandatory part of the curriculum:

A nation that honors its religious traditions in the schools will end up honoring traditions in the broader public sphere. A nation that heaps dishonor on its religious traditions by banning them from the schools will end up dishonoring its traditions in the broader public sphere as America consistently does today.

Without religion, Hazony believes, reasonable men guided by reason alone will simply go around in circles ending up, perhaps, with Marxist conclusions, maybe white-nationalist results, or possibly liberal or libertarian outcomes. Nobody knows and anything goes, unless there is this outside-and-above-man standard, benchmark, and imposer of right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust, and free and unfree on humanity.

What should be the standards and benchmarks and expected criteria for ideas and actions, according to Hazony? In other words, according to him, what does God want of us? He tells us honor and restraint. Restraint, he says, teaches us that there are natural and social limits in the confines of which freedom is possible by specifying what is or is not right, possible or doable. Honor refers to following standards and acting accordingly.

Teaching Restraint and Honor in Public Schools

Hazony believes that reason and public discourse or introspective reflection cannot ensure the discovery, valuation, and following of restraints in our personal conduct. Reason unrestrained by God-based tradition leads to chaos and tyranny, he implies. Only tradition, that is, acceptance of what earlier generations have handed down to us, can safely guide us to know that we should not do this or that — that we are obligated to do one thing but not another — and can bring restraint to people’s personal and social conduct. Once you tell people that they can decide what is good or bad, or right and wrong, the genie is out of the bottle and social instability and discord seemingly inevitably follow.

How do you get people to act in these restrained ways, according to Hazony? By honoring people who do — that is, by recognizing, socially rewarding, and respecting honorable conduct. But what is honorable conduct? Hazony suggests:

My proposal is straightforward: Freedom cannot be maintained in the absence of self-constraint. And the only known means of causing individuals to shoulder hardship and constraint without coercion or significant financial compensation is by rewarding them with honor — that is, with status and public approval that is tied to their upholding inherited norms and ideals rather than choosing to be free of them. Thus, for example, in the old Christian and Jewish order, individuals were honored for marrying and raising children, for military service, for national and religious leadership, for teaching the young, for knowledge of Scripture, law and custom, for performing religious duties, and for personally caring for the aged.

So serving in the military or in public office, as well as caring for one’s parents, and being a good husband, father, and son, should be honored in society. But as far as Hazony is concerned,

The demolition of the nation’s traditions is, at bottom, a struggle to prevent the government, schools, and private institutions from giving honor to norms inherited from the past.… I don’t believe that America has much of a chance of righting itself, for example, so long as most children are required to attend schools in which God and Scripture are daily dishonored by their absence.

Notice that while Hazony refers to the positive influence of traditions inherited from the past, and the positive social power of people being inspired and guided by what may be learned from the long experience of mankind, he believes in the state as one or even the primary societal mechanism to inculcate those traditions and values within the nation.

Disturbed that the political and cultural rationalism that he decries is propagandized for in the government-run and government-mandated educational system, he does not call for ending the government’s compulsory schooling and allowing free, voluntary, and competitive private education to function in its place. No, he wants cultural and “conservative” centrally planned schooling as much as those on “the left” that he disagrees with and disapproves of.

Conservative-Content Public Schooling Is Still Social Engineering

Conservative values wrapped in religious training will be the political vehicle to put the “right” ideas, attitudes, and conduct into people’s heads. A competition of ideas concerning which if any traditions should be followed, an intellectual rivalry about alternative notions of “tradition” and its appropriate content, is not what Hazony wants. He says that the bedrock of American traditionalist conservatism is Judaism and Christianity, and these must be reintroduced into the curriculum and taught to every young American.

But whose “Christianity” and “Judaism”? He admits that religion has been the basis of conflict and discord in the past, but he shrugs off the possibility that once religion is mandatory in every schoolroom, the battles will bubble to the surface once again. Catholicism or Protestantism? Among the many branches, which variations on the Protestant theme will be given greater prominence?

What about Judaism, and what happens when Jewish students are insistently taught that “Jesus is their Lord and Savior, the Redeemer who has already come and died for their sins”? And by the way, words matter. What will “the Book” be called: the “Old Testament” or the “Hebrew Bible”?

This, alone, can cause flurries of conflict and controversy. Is it necessary to point out the discord that has arisen over evolution versus creationism? Once religious training is compulsory in government schools, that will cause no end of warfare among parents and proselytizers of one reading of the Bible versus another on science versus faith. What about atheists and Muslims or Buddhists?

The classical liberal and libertarian case for full privatization of education defuses all these curriculum troubles and tensions. Parents and students select their own education and schooling institutions. Schools compete in offering curricula and teaching methods to serve and suit the desires and demands of many different consumers of education.

But this is not what Hazony wants to hear. For him, this demonstrates the supposed bankruptcy of “liberal” rationalism. There is one true tradition and one true faith to be taught in America. And if he is in charge — or those who think like him — all of us will get it whether or not we want part, all, or none of it. Yoram Hazony’s conservative traditionalism is a potential road to theological authoritarianism.

Hayek on Reasonable vs. Rationalistic Enlightenment

But what is most missing in Hazony’s harking back to pre-Enlightenment premises for society is a failure on his part to appreciate that there were several intellectual strands within the Enlightenment tradition that emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries. His caricature of Enlightenment liberalism is one of them, albeit a highly influential one.

In 1946, Austrian economist F.A. Hayek delivered a lecture on what he called “Individualism: True and False.” The gist of his argument was that there had been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding concerning the relationship between the individual and society, both in terms of social theory and practical politics.

He juxtaposed what he suggested could be considered two traditions of social and political individualism that emerged out of the Enlightenment: the British and the French. The British tradition included such thinkers as John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson (the last three of whom were among those often referred to as the Scottish moral philosophers). For these British thinkers, social theory began with a focus on the individual because they understood that “society” is not an entity separate from the interactions of the individuals who comprise it. To understand the origin and evolution of society, we must understand the logic and interactive processes of human action.

For especially the Scottish philosophers, John Locke’s conception of an original state of nature prior to government, out of which a “social contract” emerged for the formation of government so individuals may be more secure and protected in their “natural rights” to their respective lives, liberty, and honestly acquired property, was a mental experiment to deduce the logic of a limited government desired to ensure liberty rather than abridge it.

It was not claimed that this was the origin of society or government. It was understood and explained by David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and others that the ideas and institutions of a free society had emerged and taken form through long societal evolutionary processes up until their own times. It was asking precisely what our reason and our historical knowledge and our human experience tell us about the nature of man, the heritage of earlier generations, and the practices of governments in the past that led to the suggested benefits of, in Adam Smith’s words, “a System of Natural Liberty,” with its wide personal and economic freedom, if liberty and prosperity was to be cultivated for all.

Furthermore, in this British or Scottish tradition the conception of man is not that of a rational calculator presumed to possess perfect knowledge and guided only by a narrow material notion of “self-interest.” Instead, man was seen as motivated by passions as much as by cool reason, with imperfect and limited knowledge. The social order and many of its institutional traditions, customs, and rules of interaction have evolved slowly and in unanticipated and unpredictable ways over many human lifetimes. Much of what is called human society and civilization is, therefore, seen as “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (to use the phrase coined by Ferguson and often quoted by Hayek).

Thus the British and Scottish Enlightenment tradition of individualism had little confidence in the ability to plan society. And particularly because of man’s imperfections and foibles, these thinkers were reluctant to see power centralized in the hands of government. Far better to decentralize decision-making in the private competitive market so as to limit the potential damage from error and abuse.

In the alternative French tradition represented by thinkers such as Descartes, Hayek argued, there was a tendency toward hyper-rationality, a belief that man through his reason could understand clearly and definitely how to remake society. All social institutions and traditions not “provable” through logic and rational reflection to be “useful” or “good” were to be criticized and torn down. In their place would be constructed a new world according to a politically planned design. In many of his writings over the years, Hayek tried to show the “fatal conceit” in those who presumed to possess the knowledge and ability to reconstruct man and society in their own “enlightened” image.

Hazony’s Failure to Appreciate the Importance of Liberalism

If Hazony knew about or appreciated the Scottish variation on Enlightenment thinking, particularly as interpreted and formulated by someone like Friedrich Hayek, a reasonable conclusion would be that it is classical liberalism that not only respects individual liberty and economic freedom, but cultivates a social setting in which the evolved traditions and institutions of society are able to endure and “naturally” evolve over time in the context of the heritage of the past.

It is of note that in volume one of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973), Hayek’s last major work, he warned that the “rationalism” that Hazony opposes often fosters that type of revolt against reason that can lead blind faith, emotional irrationalism, and calls to higher intuitions claimed to be possessed by political ideologues and fanatics to arise as the false alternatives to the use of reason properly understood.

So that society can escape from both dangers — the hyper-rationalism of the social engineer and the anti-rationalism of the coercing traditionalist — Hayek explained, “Liberalism for this reason restricts deliberate control of the overall order of the society to the enforcement of general rules as are necessary for the formation of a spontaneous order [of a free society], the details of which we cannot foresee.”

Yoram Hazony’s call for a conservative traditionalism supported by government through enforced public schooling and political propagandizing in the public square for developing “honorable” conduct among the citizenry is another variation on the collectivist and statist theme. It is the other side of the same paternalistic and central planning coin as the politically correct multiculturalists that Hazony wishes to unseat.

Once there is an attempt to re-create or design the institutions of a society and their content, the “traditionalist” becomes the very type of “rationalist” social engineer that Hazony says he opposes. The very nature of the traditions of belief, values, codes of conduct, and inherited conceptions of “right things to do” is precisely their lack of centralized planning and construction.

Real Traditions Are Part of the Spontaneous Order

Traditions and the social institutions in which they are embedded emerge, take their forms, influence, and guide human action and interactions most often in unplanned ways. They originate out of the actions of individuals or groups of individuals usually pursuing purposes of the moment and their personal futures, with unintended consequences of which they have little or no forethought and which oftentimes they could not fully imagine if they tried.

Think for a moment of an example from Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on Civil Society (1767) concerning the emergence of property rights, law, and government:

Mankind, in following the present sense of their minds, in striving to remove inconveniences, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrives at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, and pass on, like animals, in the track of their nature, without perceiving its end. He who first said, “I will appropriate this field: I will leave it to my heirs,” did not perceive, that he was laying the foundation of civil laws and political establishments.

Or Adam Smith’s explanation in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1766) of part of the institutional origins of probity, punctuality, and trustworthiness arising from the self-interested conduct of commerce and trade:

Whenever commerce is introduced into any country, probity and punctuality always accompany it.… It is far more reducible to self-interest, that general principle which regulates the actions of every man, and which leads men to act in a certain manner from views of advantage, and is as deeply implanted in an Englishman as a Dutchman.

A dealer is afraid of losing his character, and is scrupulous in observing every engagement. When a person makes perhaps 20 contracts in a day, he cannot gain so much by endeavoring to impose on his neighbors, as the very appearance of a cheat would make him lose.

When people seldom deal with one another, we find that they are somewhat disposed to cheat, because they can gain more by a smart trick than they can lose by the injury that it does to their character.… Wherever dealings are frequent, a man does not expect to gain so much by any one contract as by probity and punctuality in the whole, and a prudent dealer, who is sensible of his real interest, would rather choose to lose what he has a right to than give any ground for suspicion.…

When the greater part of people are merchants they always bring probity and punctuality into fashion, and these therefore are the principle virtues of a commercial nation.
The inability to know where and how these institutions emerge and the details and importance of their forms and patterns was emphasized by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Weiser in his treatise Social Economics (1914):

The economy is full of social institutions which serve the entire economy and are so harmonious in structure as to suggest that they are the creation of an organized social will. Actually they can only have originated in the cooperation of periodically independent persons. Such a social institution is illustrated by money, by the economic market, by the division of labor.…

How could any general contractual agreement be reached as to institutions whose being is still hidden in the mists of the future, and is only conceived in an incomplete manner by a few far-seeing persons, while the great mass can never clearly appreciate the nature of such an institution until it actually attained its full form and is generally operative?

And, finally, as Ludwig von Mises expressed it in Theory and History (1957):

The historical process is not designed by individuals. It is the composite outcome of the intentional actions of all individuals. No man can plan history. All he can plan and try to put into effect is his own actions which, jointly with the actions of other men, constitute the historical process. The Pilgrim Fathers did not plan to found the United States.

All that most likely can be effectively done to create the “space” for the reemergence of traditions reflecting the actions, experiences, and the heritage of intergenerational wisdom is the removal of the political planning, regulation, and redistributive government policies that handicap and restrain the free action of multitudes of individuals.

In their place should be the “end-independent” general rules of individual rights, private property, free and voluntary exchange and association, and an impartial rule of law recognizing and protecting those “natural” rights to personal freedom and peaceful interrelationships among the members of society.

In this setting the use and role of “reason” to guide our actions, the appeal to some of faiths (and which ones), the forms of conduct considered appropriately “restraining” and deserving to be “honored” would spontaneously emerge anew. No doubt, this process will draw upon the heritage and legacies of the traditions of the past that remain as the residues of human affairs, in spite of the impact of the social-engineering mentality and its works.

But Yoram Hazony’s central plan to socially engineer the re-creation of the tradition-based society will be defeated by the very rationalist uses of government that he has chosen to reverse the rationalism of the political Left he so strongly opposes.

Richard M. Ebeling

The post Hazony’s Tradition-Based Society Is a Form of Social Engineering appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

A Broken System

Yet we continue to hear the “Red for Ed” crowd scream for more funding. Here in the state of Indiana, the superintendent of public education is leading an assault on the state legislature for a meager 2 percent increase in state funding. Many educators are characterizing this as a decrease in funding! In no other walk of life would we continue to pour so many resources into a failed system. If you had any doubt about this after reading Part One, let me present you with some facts.

In what was one of many fiery speaking engagements, the late John Taylor Gatto delivered a line that has resonated with me as I have studied the effects the public schooling system has on children. In this particular speech, Gatto was recounting the story of Jaime Escalante, the educator who successfully taught calculus at Garfield High School in Los Angeles yet was forced to resign.

As he finishes describing the trials and fate of Escalante, Gatto explains that above racism and other forms of bigotry is the embedded idea that what really occurred was a deliberate attempt to stop genuine learning. Earlier in the speech, Gatto laid out a compelling case of how and why schooling is meant to keep citizens ignorant. This success at an inner city school was not going to be tolerated by the establishment. He implored his listeners to understand the real problem and to quit “fencing with shadows.”

Flushing Money Down the Drain

So what does this mean? Throughout history, compulsory schooling has consistently been viewed as not only progressive but also in need of reform. The most common method of reform has been to throw piles of money at the problem. According to the Department of Education’s (DOE) website, the DOE spent an estimated $69.4 billion in 2017. Compare that to the initial $2.9 billion ($23 billion adjusted for inflation) budgeted under the Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965.

To put this into context, education spending as a percent of gross domestic product has gone from 2.6 percent in the 1950s to 6.1 percent as recently as 2010. This is just a look at federal spending; each state also allocates a portion of their budget to education, with California leading the way at over $72 million. Finally, we have seen a tremendous amount of private capital injected to help reform schools. Institutions such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have invested billions of dollars in education. All this spending must be yielding better results, right? Let’s take a look.

Contrary to what those in public education will tell you, the system is flush with cash, which generates very few positive results. Take New York as an example. The state was front and center in the reform battle during President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) initiative.According to Cornell’s NYC

Leading up to the controversial dash for cash, the city had been experiencing an education overhaul, including battles over charters and a knock-down fight with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Board of Education chief, Joel Klein, and the powerful unions. The state was seeing an infusion of Wall Street cash backing charters, which were being throttled by state Democrats and union bosses.

In addition to the almost $700 million in RTT funds and the $61.4 million spent at the state level, the city of New York saw millions of dollars invested from groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). So what are the results of these investments? According to Cornell University’s NYC Education Data program, less than half of all eighth graders in the state are proficient in English language arts and math. We see this same type of result across the country.

Indeed, these results do not stack up well internationally, either. A 2015 Organization for Economic Cooperation Development report shows just how far behind American students are falling. The average score for 15-year-olds in math, language, and science on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test for the US was 470. Only Mexico (402), Chile (423) and Turkey (420) had lower scores. Thirty-one other nations had scores higher than the US, with Japan leading the way at 532.

Where to Look for Solutions

Why, in 2019, after all the money spent and all the reforms that have been instituted, are we still seeing such horrific results in our schools? The answer is much simpler than it has been made out to be: The system is broken. There is no remedy to fix this system. It is fundamentally flawed. The famous saying that you cannot fix a problem with the same mind that created it rings so true. So if reform will not work, what are we to do?

Again, the answer is simple: unschool. First, let’s be clear—charters and virtual schools are not desired long-term outcomes. They are soft variants of the current system, and while they may show growth in the short-term, in the long run, they still stifle learning due to government regulation. There are many methods for accomplishing the goal of unschooling. Some systems are already in place, such as homeschooling. Another great model is the Sudbury School. This is a democratic system of education that allows students the autonomy to determine their own paths of learning.

All across the nation, students are being prodded like cattle into classrooms, and the one-size-fits-all approach is failing them. They are bored and uninterested, and we blame them. We tell them and their parents that there is something medically wrong with them—that they need medication and counseling. This ought to weigh on the minds of every adult in America as cruel and abusive. Only systems that return power, and ultimately the desire to learn in children, will suffice. We need more educators like John Taylor Gatto to speak up and have the courage to buck the system. We need more leaders like Kerry McDonald and Dr. Peter Gray, who have led the charge in researching and promoting the unschooling model. Until that time, we will keep fencing with shadows.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post The History and Results of our Disastrous Public School System, Part II appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools, multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.

Schooling Monopoly

The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling), and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is basically one accepted way to educate kids today: school them.

Given the relatively poor performance of American students on international achievement tests, you would think schooling might receive a second look. Quite the opposite, actually. It is instead made mandatory, and taxpayers are forced to subsidize it. This begs the question: Why would the government continue to propagate a system that produces such questionable results? The answer lies in their motives, and their motives are best understood by reviewing a brief history of compulsory schooling.

Roots in Germany

The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany. Martin Luther was a fierce advocate for state-mandated public schooling, not because he wanted kids to become educated, but because he wanted them to become educated in the ways of Lutheranism. Luther was resourceful and understood the power of the state in his quest to reform Jews, Catholics, and other non-believers. No less significant was fellow reformist John Calvin, who also advocated heavily for forced schooling. Calvin was particularly influential among the later Puritans of New England (Rothbard, 1979).

Considering compulsory schooling has such deep roots in Germany, it should be no surprise that the precursor to our American government school system came directly from the German state of Prussia. In 1807, fresh off a humiliating defeat by the French during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Germans instituted a series of vast, sweeping societal reforms. Key within this movement was education reform, and one of the most influential educational reformers in Germany at the time was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Like Luther before him, Fichte saw compulsory schooling as a tool to indoctrinate kids, not educate them. Fichte describes his aim for Germany’s “new education” this way:

Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.

But actual education is an organic process and requires free will; this was not an attempt at education. Schools were to be factories that would churn out the type of obedient, compliant workers the state preferred. Here’s Fichte again explaining the desired interaction between teachers and students:

[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

Fichte understood full well that a statist vision could most easily be realized if governments were given kids’ minds early on:

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

If such a totalitarian vision were quietly isolated in Germany, or even Europe, it might be of very little consequence. But it would be this Prussian model of control-by-schooling that 19th-century American politicians would bring to our nation—and the one that is still with us today.

Horace Mann’s Evaluation

Referred to as the first great American advocate of public education, Horace Mann embarked on a journey to Europe in 1843 to evaluate national school systems. He toured several western European states, but Prussia left the most impressionable impact on him (see his 7th Annual Report of the Board of Education, 1843). Once back in the United States, Mann began to lobby heavily for a taxpayer-funded government school system that largely mirrored that of Prussia’s.

Mann was no ordinary, grassroots American activist; he was an extremely influential public figure. He had been a part of the Massachusetts State Legislature, he was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and he later became a United States congressman. He had enormous reach. In short, Mann’s influence worked. His “common school movement,” as it would be known, began to spread across the Northeast, with government schooling taking root in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

By the end of the decade, all states had public schools. Unsatisfied with forcing taxpayers to fund a government school system, Massachusetts also wanted to force everyone to go. What good would an organized system of indoctrination be if people could simply ignore it? They instituted the first compulsory attendance laws in the 1850s, and neighboring states began to follow suit; by the end of the 19th century, 34 states had compulsory school laws.

By 1918, they all did. Over the decades, the number of years kids were forced to go to school slowly increased, as did the number of required school days per year. Fines and penalties would be imposed nationwide for school truancy. Within decades, the federal government passed the ESEA, which thrust the national government into education and shortly thereafter established a federal Department of Education. Mann’s vision for a truly national school system would be realized just a little over a century after his initial visits to Prussia.

Pure Intentions?

It is impossible to discuss, or even understand, the failures of our school system without understanding its origins. The motivations were not pure; they were never to educate. That need not be speculation—it is directly from the mouths of the reformers themselves. The objective was to nationalize the youth in a particular mold.

From Luther to Fichte, the idea to use the coercive power of the state to force kids into schools and indoctrinate them was clear. Horace Mann became instrumental in importing this system and helping it spread throughout the United States. Attempts to reform this system amount to an incredible waste of time and resources; discussions of reform are a waste of breath. The system is rotten at its foundation and must be abolished completely.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post The History and Results of America’s Disastrous Public School System, Part I appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

When I was a freshman in college, I was in a research-based writing class that consisted of a very small student-to-faculty ratio and allowed us attendees, a roster that barely broke the double digits, to personally interact with our teacher and have meaningful conversations and debates rather than simply sit back in a huge lecture hall and be talked down to. I much preferred this downsized format, as the smaller, more localized execution of college courses tends to breed more interaction and discourage straight-up lecturing. And as the research shows time and again, whether it be at the undergraduate level or even at the level of highly specialized graduate programs, the discussion model (also referred to as “cooperative learning”) crushes the lecture model every single time in areas of retention, enjoyment, and intellectual stimulation.

As a result, many colleges and universities (especially the private, autonomous ones) have been shifting their class structures from the giant lecture halls to the more intimate seminar rooms, and “student-to-faculty ratio” is now one of the boxes for every who’s-who college to tick in their profile on U.S. News and World Report. It’s something colleges strive for. And it proves that in an educational setting, smaller, localized, and more controlled management breeds the best results.

So imagine my surprise when, upon overhearing a conversation between myself and two other students discussing the political merits of (at the time) presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, our class teacher decided to butt in and loudly proclaim for the whole class to hear that Ron Paul was a naive, silly choice for a candidate because he “wants to abolish the Department of Education!” Seeing as how I could tell this was a sore subject for her (my teacher), and my grade was important to me, I didn’t press the matter much further. But looking back on that moment, I wish that I had.

I wish that I had taken my teacher to task and asked her, in front of everyone, to describe for us what she believed the Department of Education actually did. And I wish I had made it a point to ridicule her almost certainly incorrect answer in a constructive way so that everyone there might have actually (it was a classroom, after all) learned something. This woman, taking advantage of the decentralized, downsized format in her own classroom, was advocating against that same approach being applied to the public school system in America. Why? I almost certainly knew the answer: She, like so many others, was under the impression that the Department of Education somehow equated to “education” itself.

“Education” — this monolithic thing that we all talk about but barely understand (and thanks to neuroscience, are on the cusp of completely revolutionizing). Yet almost everyone seems to agree on two single points:

1)  The public school system is failing
2) Whatever we do, we must not abolish the Department of Education.

These are actually contradictory positions to hold, because the latter is largely responsible for the former. And instead of actually informing ourselves of what the Dept. of Ed. truly does in practice, we have allowed our fears of the ever-creeping illiteracy we face (i.e., a regressive march to a less educated past) to be cultivated into this hysteria that helps no one and obfuscates the very truth that might very well save us from this impending failure of our charge to educate and empower our younger generations.

The Department of Education, in essence, distributes funding. That’s the biggest function it currently serves. What if it didn’t exist? Or at the very least, what it were significantly downsized? Would the funding go away? Would schools disappear? Would our children be deprived of the opportunity to learn? Well, no, of course not. The funding would still occur, but it would simply be distributed at the local state and county levels rather than through the top-down, centralized mechanism the Dept. of Ed. currently functions as. Much in the same vein as with the downsizing and localizing of the creation and execution of college classes, the downsizing and localizing of the function of funding our public schools stands to put the power back into the hands of the administrators, teachers, and even the students. Why? Because when centralized planning leads to the kind of misaimed funding, wasted opportunities, and failing retention rates that the Department of Education has over the decades, only a madman would fight to keep such a system in place when the evidence in a related field shows very clearly that the opposite approach leads to better results. In other words: if downsizing works in higher education, why would it not be at least worth trying in K-12?

Enter the likes of people such as Dr. Paul, whose policy proposals on education I touched upon at the top of this article. He wasn’t the first or the last person in congress to propose such an idea as to do away with the Department of Education and redistribute funding to the states, and yet every single time a new guy comes along with a similar proposal, the headlines are always the same: “Evil Republicans Threaten to Get Rid of Public Education!”

Okay, I’m exaggerating, perhaps– but only a little. The point is that the full story is never told, and the department itself is almost always written as synonymous with its namesake. And this is more than sloppy reporting; it is factually incorrect.

The latest ridiculousness has happened, as of this writing, as a result of Congressman Thomas Massie’s recent bill proposing to abolish the department. Once again, the headlines encourage hysteria, and the American people oblige.

But Massie himself in a recent interview with The Blaze made his case very plan and clear: “It’s ten words,” he said when describing the contents of his drafted proposal. “I hope my colleagues can bother to read ten words.” When probed in the interview to respond to all the fears that abolishing the Department of Education would amount to abolishing “education” itself, Massie responded very succinctly: “The Department of Education has no classrooms, and no teachers … it has roughly 4,500 bureaucrats making around $105,000 apiece a year, dictating to states what the students will learn and how they will learn it.”

Exactly.

The idea that a handful of politicians with their own personal biases can dictate who gets what amount of money, what textbook, etc., based on arbitrary whims– this is the sort of thing we as Americans concerned for our children’s educations should be rallying passionately against, not in favor of. And yet, to let the headlines tell the story, people like Massie are just evil schemers who want to wreck our kids’ futures. Why they want to do this? The leftist media can never explain that. But they don’t have to– in their world, all Republicans are bad, and all “true” liberals are good. And that’s a shame, because we miss out on one of the Republicans’ few brilliant ideas actually becoming a beneficial reality as a result of such fear mongering.

This latest proposition will likely come and go as always, but if by some miracle it does get passed, I want to inform my liberal friends that that sky, despite all the hollering and pointing, will not fall. And your kids will be grateful in the end.

The post Dear Liberals: Dissolving The Dept. of Education Would NOT End Public School appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.