Overcome Stockholm Syndrome

Often in debates with non-anarchists, my expectations of a free, peaceful, spontaneously ordered society are met with great skepticism. I attribute this lack of imagination to the government indoctrination camps we are all forced through as defenseless children.

For example, in high school I partook in an AP Government course of United States History. For those not familiar with the Advanced Placement program, it's a statist invention that allows the more gifted students to take a course during high school followed with a test that counts for college credit, provided you receive a high enough score. I passed all of the AP tests I took except the government one.

At the time, the subject of government, particularly the lineage of Presidents, did not interest me. Now, the subject interests me in the same way that the gruesome carnage of a vehicular accident (somehow these always occur on government roads) attracts passing motorists. That is, I'm interested in government's numerous failures, inefficiencies, and manufactured emergencies. Fortunately, I can gorge my macabre attention with any daily news program. That's a market service!

But why would the high school, or more accurately the AP program, force knowledge of US history down my gullet? Instead of say, China or India, which both have 100 times longer history than the United States. They claim that it's important for me to know my heritage, but at the time I was more preoccupied with the future (and mostly still am). Yet, they didn't actually show me lessons that have ramifications today.

For example, did you know that all of the US Presidents that fought against central banking, or that tried to reduce its power have been assassinated? Is that coincidence or conspiracy? And it doesn't even have to be conspiracy, but merely self-interest. All it would take is a single individual with questionable ethics out of the affected group. Have you ever known a banker to willingly part from other people's money?

Or what about the introduction of the income tax? My parents and grandparents don't recall living without this kind of wealth slavery, but there was a time when America was a prosperous land without income tax. George Washington himself led an army against protesters objecting to an excise tax on Whiskey. (A tale beautifully recounted by Rothbard in When the Feds First Attacked the Americans) There was a time when nobody would take the job of tax collector because of social opprobrium.

I was taught to revere Abraham Lincoln as a political god that help to keep the union in tact. Whereas I now think of him as an exemplar politician, raping the constitution, violating human rights by suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning reporters, needlessly calling the country into war against itself, and stomping the basic sovereign right of secession. He even formed a special praetorian guard with initials SS. Lincoln is America's Hitler.

Ok, so the US government has an interest in all children learning a history approved by that same government. Any wonder these anti-government lessons were left out? Even in the "advanced" program I was fed mostly positive images of government, with outcomes of war written by the winners. An endless justification of criminally destructive behavior!

Also, my school didn't have any course with actually questioned the necessity of government. I was never introduced to Rothbard, Block, or David Friedman. I had to make these discoveries on my own much, much later! What I value most about my education, I cannot attribute to the state, but to my friends, myself, and my own relentless curiosity that somehow survived the indoctrination.

Sadly, I cannot say the same of those I talk to and interact with in daily life. They have been starved of these liberating ideas. And every time I suggest, even in one tiny aspect, that some service can be performed better through voluntary cooperation than through government coercion, I meet with desperate fanaticism, of the kind that can only come from 18 years of indoctrination. For the imprisoned so love the caves that protect them from outside illumination.

By finding this page, I know that your journey into mental freedom has already begun. Continue taking learning into your own hands. Don't trust the government school to accurately teach you the history of government.

Flush the state's deep programming from your mind by following a path of freedom and self-determination. Live your life as much on your own terms as practical, setting an example to others: the power of freedom!

Oregon's Educational Blunder

Last week, while I was out having fun and railing about the Authoritarian Lessons of Education, a statist education bill in Oregon passed through the legislative assembly. The advocates nicknamed it the "Pay-it-Forward Bill" because it aims to "replace current system of tuition and fees required to attend institution of higher education" (HB 3472), because the tuition fees are getting rather out of control.

I really have to hand it to these government types. They seriously think that the un-affordability of their public universities is comparable to the end of civilization. You don't believe me? Read the bill. They just added a section:

SECTION 4.  { + This 2013 Act being necessary for the immediate
preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency
is declared to exist, and this 2013 Act takes effect on its
passage. + }

According to the plan: residents of Oregon graduating high school will be able to prolong their childhood by attending, for free, an Oregon public college or university. But watch out! Any time he government gives something away for free, you know it shows up someplace else: "It's a TAX"!.

Sure enough, they plan to pay for current students by withholding a small percentage of income after graduation. Remember when I claimed that people coming out of a state indoctrination center are unable to imagine voluntary mechanisms? Apparently, I wasn't speaking hyperbole.

The bill’s passage did not result from a multi-year coordinated effort hammered out by elite policymakers. Incredibly, it started just this past fall, with a college senior project at Portland State University. The 6-credit “capstone” course was called “Student Debt: Economics, Policy and Advocacy,” and it sought to combine deep research of the history of student debt with the real-world experience of actively seeking potential remedies. “We wanted to propose a solution to begin to resolve the issue on the state level,” said Ariel Gruver, one of the 15 students. (Oregon Students Fight Back Against Debt, And Win)

Instead of breaking up the bureaucratic monstrosity that has led to higher tuition, these people, students even! want to double down. Graduates from this program contract to pay 3% of their future earnings for 20 years, so that the proceeds can go to pay for a new generation of state captured students. This sounds suspiciously like a scholarship, except that it's not discipline specific, so it doesn't respond to market demands for skills.

And the reporting on this program is full of optimistic nonsense. Let me poke some holes: What if graduates leave the state? what if they leave the country? Does an Oregon program extend to foreign income? What if they majored in something worthless and never pay back in because they can't get a job? or they get a job within the Oregon university system and leech the program for their entire life?

I see no reason why similar contracts, individually negotiated wouldn't achieve similar goals. I mean, my parents were able to secure students loan for their tuition. These loans were not as heavily regulated at the time, so the provider had to worry about default. Because of this concern, STEM majors had an easier time getting loans. Rates followed market demand for skills, discouraging abuse on all sides.

This Oregon plan doesn't have those balances. In fact, people with no understanding of economics think of this deficit as a virtue:

This [pre-tax payroll deduction] creates an incentive to choose a career based on personal fulfillment, rather than one that earns lots of money to pay down student debt. Income-based repayment exists at the federal level, but it’s a higher percentage of income (capped at 10 percent of discretionary income) and it merely pays off individual student loan debt. It does not have Pay It Forward’s element of universality, where everyone pays into the program and attends college tuition-free. (Oregon Students Fight Back Against Debt, And Win)

So Oregon is basically toying with implementing a universal income-based repayment (IBR) scheme, something I have been (probably excessively) advocating on behalf of for over a year.
...
Additionally, because a universal IBR system requires individuals to pay back a percentage of their income, it ensures that graduates that go on to more lucrative careers effectively subsidize graduates that do not. So, it is (in a sense) internally redistributive, which is a positive from an egalitarian perspective. Finally, because repayment is based on income, no one will find themselves overly burdened by the repayment obligation. (Oregon Is Doing Free Higher Education the Right Way)

So it's egalitarian to make others pay? To force the highly skilled that are now to subsidize the mediocre. To allocate costs to society, the same one that you claim to be saving! which now has to pay for the malinvestment in worthless majors! Oh but wait, this plan is approved by politicians, who probably did pick such majors, and journalists, who undoubtedly picked such majors!

Don't do it Oregon! Free (statist) Education is a TAX!

Breaking Free of Authoritarian Schooling

In the last few posts I've recorded some ways in which the state schooling system indoctrinates its victims to respect its authority, even when that authority is later abused. This system keeps most people subservient to government bureaucrats and politicians. Fortunately for you, now that I have pointed out only a small portion of the damage, you are ready to continue breaking out of their control.

Winston Churchhill

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.

George Bernard Shaw

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

Today, we face an entirely different world than when government schooling was first invented. In fact, the primary reasons for its invention no longer apply, for the free market (as taxed as it has been for these last 150years) has delivered several mechanisms through which we can educate our children, each other, and ourselves. We can finally be free of the government lessons. We have the opportunity to think independently, and to nurture that skill in others.

John Holt

A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.

For the parents of young children, I strongly recommend home schooling. There are many resources online that can help out. Using the internet for tight communication and sharing of ideas, many local communities have home schooling meetups. They trade off the burden of teaching and "socialization". They share learning techniques. It's an investment that pays off over time.

For example, I know one capable and self-motivated individual who learned his skills under the direction of his own parents. By the time he was in 9th grade, he could be told "write an essay on X" without any further direction. He'd internalized the self-correction mechanisms necessary for critical thought and independence. The government didn't hand him everything on a silver platter, or force him into maladaptive behavior like learned helplessness and fear of being wrong. Rather, he learned the most useful skill of all: how to self-educate.

Isaac Asimov

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

I often feel rather hopeless compared to those home-schooled, equally smart and knowledgeable individuals 10 years my junior. But it's never too late! Even as an adult you can give yourself a remarkable education. You simply have to take advantage of the materials available. These are both more plentiful and more accessible today than ever before.

For example, Scott Young, did some self-study using MIT's OpenCourseWare. In one year he did their entire 4-year CS program, and motivated himself using a website about the MIT Challenge.

MIT's not the only one. Some of my friends are using Coursera, Udacity, and KahnAcademy, just to name the biggest names. The only drawback seems to be a lack of credentialism. But these educational pioneers are working rapidly to solve that problem (and make a profit doing so). With many of these courses coming from the big-name institutions, like Stanford and Georgia Tech, you have very little reason to pay both the quarterly admission and housing fees plus 4 years of your life attending a brick and mortar. You can get nearly 80% of the quality at home, at your own pace, provided you have the self-discipline and diligence.

And it doesn't matter if you don't have credentials for the stuff that you learn at home. You can ussing the same medium that you use to acquire those skills, namely the Internet, to make a page that advertises your abilities! What employer would turn down Scott Young, after they see his page? Surely he's worth more, after a single year, than an actual MIT attendee after four years!

Stanly Kubrick

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.

So let go the statist mentalities that hold you back. Pursue the topics that most interest you. Set some plans for self-improvement, and work on your goals a little bit each day.

John Holt

Education now seems the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.

Self-realization, self-actualization, and self-empowerment are the goals of anarchy. And they all begin with self-education!

Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 3: The State Controls You

The lessons of Authoritarian School build on each other, just as you might expect of any cold mathematics. The first and second lessons reveal how the state teaches every child that it provides for them and knows better than they do what they should do with their lives. We shall now see how damaging the government schooling program can be. Every generation put through its mental grinder emerges without the creativity and independence that would make for a better world. But that independence, while valuable for society, is dangerous to the state, and must be systematically crushed.

The Third Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state controls you. It can kidnap your children for hours each day. During that time it provides a structured environment that teaches learned helplessness and dependence on authority.

This lesson has a stark effect on both the children and the adults, nobody escapes its pressures. Through mandatory attendance laws, the state restricts learning opportunities to institutions that it controls and administers. Today, adults go along with these laws because, having been through school themselves, they can envision no alternatives. They are taught as children the first two lessons in a state-controlled environment and grow up to think that mass kidnapping is somehow OK, and even for their own good.

Wendy Priesnitz

The mere fact that most school attendance is compulsory reflects an attitude of mistrust of children and their desire to make sense of the world. In fact, if governments were really serious about their professed goal of developing, nurturing, and enhancing the intellectual and moral autonomy of the young, would they not have to abolish compulsory, externally imposed education?

I want to say that they give up their children because they fear the men with guns, but the reality is far more insidious. The kidnapping is mostly voluntary. But it takes some explanation to reveal the mental damage behind this poor choice.

Think back to your experience in school, and what you remember most from it. I'd wager the majority of your time spent could be summarized in one word: boredom.

Wendy Priesnitz

One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn't know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called 'learned incompetency' and a fear of not being able to do things 'right' the first time.

Ivan Illich

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

The structure of the classroom wreaks an incalculable damage on entire generations. The lessons are arranged to hand out the tiniest morsels of knowledge. The state controls the rate of learning and sets it at the lowest common denominator.

Wendy Priesnitz

Because schools suffocate children's hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.

And the contrived appearance of difficulty convinces children and adults alike that they need the state to tell them what to do and how to think. Not coincidentally, once children have been starved of their intrinsic motivation for learning and exploring, they stop trying to do so. Inquisitive minds are destroyed by the regimented classrooms. Instead of practicing discovery the brightest minds either invent ways to entertain themselves, both productive and destructive, or they start playing the waiting game.

Wendy Priesnitz

The force-feeding process of schooling is so relentless that many students gag on it. They tune out or leave school, and in some cases, become permanently soured on learning.

Jean Piaget

When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.

John Holt

Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, the independent scientist in the child disappears.

Students may be embittered by the experience while young, but are numbed by the time they graduate. Then, as parents, they think that this hideous, taxatious system of indoctrinations is the only way to learn. Even as they recognize, in the workplace, that they use hardly a fraction of what they still remember. Far better to build skills valued in the economy through vocational apprenticeship.

Seymour Papert

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization…I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

There can only be one conclusion about state education: It kidnaps children to train them to obey orders from uniformed police and smug politicians.

Sandra Dodd

Some people can't leave school because they're carrying it around like a snail and his shell. They live there, still. School became an ingrown, hard part of them. They still define themselves by their school failures and successes.

Wendy Priesnitz

Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, and to buy what we were offered.

So the state schooling system not only manufactures a willing compliance among the populace, but it simultaneously and systematically destroys self-initiative and robs the world of a great many explorers and potential scientists.

Agatha Christie

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.

This loss affects us all, and in an incalculable way. I cannot begin to imagine how much more we might have in this world: more ideas, more efficient production, more inventive media, more imaginative entertainment. Fortunately for the state, this lost opportunity cost is unmeasurable. Otherwise, people would never have allowed it.

H. L. Mencken

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

When the self-educated put it to task (the school's inculcates are taught to never ask), the state claims that this lost economy is the price we must pay to have an orderly society.

Laurie A. Couture

Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created 'dangerous', free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.

I call bullshit on the state's claims.

John Taylor Gatto

I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.