Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 1: The State Provides

Today, in most of the western world, the State commands control of childhood education. I think this arrangement is a monstrous catastrophe. I know so, because their indoctrinations didn't completely work on me. Oh, it had an effect. They slowed me down considerably and I'll never recover the lost time or energy. But, I'm happy to be able to tell you all today about this particular tentacle of state control.

This topic will probably consume the entire week's posts. I'll talk about the work of Sugata Mitra and James Tooley, who both show ways out of the mess that I explore today. I'll talk about John Taylor Gatto, who worked within the system and has become a long-standing out-spoken critic of the evils that only government bureaucracy would invent. I'll even talk about my own personal experience, or at least what is still left in my memory. But before we get to all these wonderful conclusions...

Let's begin our navigational journey through the intellectual wasteland of statist training that's mistakenly referred to as education. We'll start first with the position of the state itself.

The First Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state provides education. Without state systematization, learning would be in anarchy. People would have a wide diversity of experiences and the distribution of opportunity would be uneven. Therefore, we couldn't have common culture. Thank the state, it can provide for us a lesson plan!

Seriously, the teachers graduating from statist schools actually agree with this statement! They don't wonder about the roots of the training system. I see these indoctrinators suffering from such severe myopia that they can't imagine any alternatives. Despite the obvious historical fact that people learned from each other and shared knowledge before the state ever existed. Really, all the state does, all it can do, is stamp its approval on certain lessons. Little wonder that the first lesson is to respect the state itself.

Think of the DMV and the quality of service that you get there. Do you want your children to be educated by people with such low levels of commitment? If the government is really, actually, beneficial in providing this service, then why are children forced to recite the pledge of allegiance? What's the deal with teaching everyone the same material? If my child skips kindergarten will they really miss out and never learn names of the primary colors? Let's find some independent thinkers to see what they have said about government schooling. I've specifically mined for quotes that relate to the First Lesson of State Indoctrination.

Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

Maya Angelou

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

Mark Twain

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Carl Rogers

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.”

Winston Churchill

"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."

Grace Llewellyn

“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.”

And for the seriously condemning quotes, we turn our attention toward the Russians.

Franz Kafka

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.”

Ivan Illich

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

But what happens when you question this lesson? Being the staunch (and self-educated) anarchist that I am (wait, would any anarchists be proud to advertise themselves as state-educated?) ... I'm losing my point here.

Oh yeah. The other year I accepted a fellowship in pedagogy at my university, and took a class about teaching. So, though I may not be an education major myself, I have spent 20 years in state school and ended that sentence with a course on teaching. During one of the class discussions, I found that every single person there took issue with the term "for-profit education". They automatically assumed that the teacher was somehow robbing the student. Yet, simultaneously, they recognize the value of private tutors!

These fellow classmates, who aim to be university-level educators themselves, implicitly thought that "for-profit" was intrinsically bad. That education is so very special it must be provided through government. In spite of the fact that these people were also very interested in their own subjects and majors and each of them held intrinsic motivation for the pursuit of knowledge, they still rejected the "for-profit" label. I'm left to wonder, why learn? Is it not to better oneself? to acquire marketable skills? to use the knowledge to help others? in a word: to profit?

I'll let a brilliant billionaire, who funds a fellowship that rewards high school students for skipping college, so that they can learn actually useful skills by practicing entrepreneurship, answer the question in his own market-based way:

Peter Thiel

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus."