From: rwallace@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <9309221958.AA06763@m16-034-18.MIT.EDU>
To: jpbonsen@MIT.EDU
Cc: rdshydur@MIT.EDU, solman@MIT.EDU, axlrose@MIT.EDU
Subject: Forw: crits of public school
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 15:58:41 EDT
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... an anti-public school speech by a libertarian activist in SF.
Includes some snippets of history I haven't heard before regarding the 
origins of mandatory schooling.  -Rik

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Date:     Wed, 22 Sep 93 9:51:25 GMT
From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu
Subject:  Public School Failures, Myths, and Perestroika
To: objectivism@vix.com
Message-Id:  <9309220951.aa27775@genie.genie.slhs.udel.edu>

A while back someone asked about California's Proposition 174, the Parental
Choice in Education Amendment that will deliver tuition vouchers to those
that want them for their students when it passes this fall (if it passes,
and survives court challenge).

I've been working on the campaign to pass it, and wrote the following
speech on the subject which I may be delivering this Friday evening.  I've
been awfully busy, or else I would've forwarded it sooner.  So busy that
I haven't changed on particular fact which was true at the time I wrote
it, but isn't any longer:

I use New Jersey to illustrate the point that the most amount of money
spent per student results in the best education.  When I wrote it, my
understanding was that New Jersey spent more per student than any other
State in the USA.  It seems to have been overtaken by New York.  This
doesn't materially alter the point, however.

Public School Failures, Myths, and Perestroika

Failures

Would you like better education in our society?  It's not only possible, 
it's a part of our history.  An early 1920s high school education enabled 
my grandma to teach school, and this plus a little correspondence school 
enabled my grandfather to become an architect, surveyor, forester, and 
county supervisor.  In the late 19th-century, Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little
House on the Prairie  fame, finished high school at the age of 16 and
immediately began teaching school.  She taught her daughter, Rose Wilder
Lane, to read and write, and Rose went on to a long and successful career as
a reporter and author.  Would you trust today's graduates to starting teaching
immediately?  As David Boaz, vice president of the Cato public policy institute,
writes: "...consider author Avis Carlson's description of her feeling of 
achievement in getting her 8th-grade diploma in a small town in Kansas in 
1907... she had to define such words as 'panegyric,' 'talisman,' 'triton,' 
and 'misconception'; to find the interest on an 8% note for $900 running 2 
years, 2 months, and 6 days; to name two countries producing large 
quantities of wheat, cotton, coal, and tea; to 'give a brief account of the 
colleges, printing, and religion in the colonies prior to the American 
Revolution'; and to 'name the principal political questions which have been 
advocated since the Civil War and to name the party which advocated each.'  
Can we imagine applicants to Harvard passing that test today?"  Personally, 
I'd be surprised if many Harvard gradates passed it!

Most of us know that inner-city public schools are in bad shape - so bad 
that their teachers send their own children to private school much more 
often than the rest of us: 46% of them do in Chicago, compared to 22% of 
all students.  About 30% of public schoolteachers do in LA and San 
Francisco, still significantly more than most parents.  David Boaz also 
writes "...of a Washington, D.C., high school valedictorian who was refused 
admission to a local college because he scored on 600 on the SAT."  A black 
man who was a major party candidate for governor of Pennsylvania last year 
said that "David Duke couldn't design a system that was worse for black 
students than the public schools."  Laura Head, professor of Black Studies 
at SF State and Oakland resident, says "I don't know a black parent with a 
job whose children are in public school."  Where are they?  In the private 
schools that have sprung up in the inner-city.  Not only do they teach 
reading instead of dyslexia, writing instead of graffitti and arithmetic 
instead of counting on a life of poverty, they're also more racially and 
economically integrated than public school.

We've heard about how bad these schools are, but as many as 650,000 
families are now taking the education of their students into their own 
hands through homeschooling.  Homeschoolers are more likely to be affluent 
suburbanites.  They can't all be religious fanatics, can they?  What could 
they know that we don't?  Could it be that public education as a whole is a 
failure?  Many might think that "it can't happen here."  But what if it 
can?  What if inner-city public schools are an indicator of how bad the 
rest of them will get if we don't figure out what the trouble is and apply 
the right remedy?

Myths

There are some things that many like to believe about public school that 
I'd like to suggest cloud our thinking about this issue.  At the risk of 
shocking you, I'd go so far as to say that they are actually mythical.

One is that the trouble is corrupt teachers and administrators.  Most of
them are good people who have to love students and teaching in order to  work
at it as hard as they do for so little.  If they were the trouble, then the
remedy would be to replace them with better people.  However, that's been
tried, and they, too, got stuck in the structural problems of public school.

Another is that the trouble is a lack of money.  "If only taxpayers weren't 
a bunch of Scrooges, everything would be fine."  Most taxpayers have had 
their generosity exhausted by the experience of having more and more of the 
money they worked so hard to earn taken by public school, while students 
have had less and less learning to show for it.  Public schools now spend twice 
as much money per student as in the 1950s, after adjusting for inflation.  
New Jersey spends the most amount of money per student of any State in the 
Union, but is anyone moving there to get their students into the New Jersey 
public school system?

Historian Samuel Blumenthal identifies the next myth: "...that public 
education is necessary as the great equalizer in our society, bringing 
together children from different ethnic, social, racial, and religious 
groups and molding them into homogenized 'Americans' - which we are all
supposed to want to be."  They don't teach any kind of equality I've ever
heard of, they teach segregation, especially by age, and hierarchy!
John Taylor Gatto is an award-winning former public schoolteacher who now
speaks out against public school.  He identifies a national curriculum,
hidden in plain sight, that public schoolteachers can't help teaching
- - he can't help teaching it himself.  Describing his experience, he writes:
"I teach class position.... If I do my job well, the kids can't even IMAGINE
themselves somewhere else, because I've shown them how to envy and fear the
better classes and to have contempt for the dumb classes.  Under this
efficient discipline, the class mostly polices itself into good marching order."

Another myth is, in Blumenthal's words again, "...that public education
is a great democratic institution fundamental to America's prosperity and
well-being."  For more than a century after the American Revolution, a
century of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom, most of the USA
had no public education as we know it.  We had charity schools for poor
students, schools where students could pay to be taught what they needed
to learn, combinations of these like the one Benjamin Franklin founded in
Philadelphia, where rich and poor alike studied alongside one another, and
the closest thing to public education were "common schools" supported by
local taxes and controlled by autonomous local school boards.  School was
accessible to all, a place students went because they chose to learn, not
because they would be punished if they didn't show up.

Public education is a coercive monopoly.  Students are forced to learn
whatever it teaches by compulsory attendance laws, and the rest of us are
forced to support its teachings by taxation.  At best, students who have
enough resources are permitted to attend any school that the State has
approved as being equivalent to public school.

This institution is a foreign import from the Kingdom of Prussia.  After
losing to Napoleon, Prussia adopted it as part of their national military-
industrial policy.  They were structured to make students into cannon-
fodder soldiers and dutiful officers for the military, wage slaves for the
mines and factories,  efficient clerks for the bureaucracies of the govern-
ment and the corporations, and an elite intellectual ruling class to make
policy for the masses and make them consent to it, marginalizing anyone
who dissented too far from their "mainstream."  The masses were to be
brainwashed to obey orders uncritically, and the elite few were to be raised
to command.

This system was admired by some rich white Boston liberals who wanted to 
use it to indoctrinate the kids of conservatives with their liberal version
of Protestant Christianity.  They were soon joined by followers of one of
the Founding Fathers of socialism, Robert Owen, who wanted to indoctrinate
kids with his ideas.  Conservatives teamed up with them to indoctrinate
the kids of Catholic immigrants with conservative Protestant Christianity.
In 1852 these special interests got the first compulsory schooling law in
the USA passed in Massachussetts, which hadn't had any such law since
the Puritans ruled.  Where there wasn't any history of compulsory schooling,
they couldn't get any such laws passed until the 1880s.

This leads us to the myth, as Blumenthal puts it, "...that, because of our
separation of church and state, public education is ideologically neutral."
Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.  For the more than four hundred
years it has been in existence, its function has been to indoctrinate the masses
with the ideology best suited to maintaining the status quo.  That's why
Martin Luther got German princes to establish public schools, that's why
John Calvin got them established in Geneva under his theocratic rule, that's
why the Puritans set them up in the Massachussetts bay colony, that's why
the Prussian aristocracy re-established them in Germany, and, as we have
seen, public education in the USA is no exception to the rule.

Perestroika

I hope that's cleared up some conceptual "cobwebs" so that we may think 
more clearly about how to get better education in our society.  There's a 
basic structure to public schools that harms students, dragging down our 
education and the rest of our society along with it.  The best way to get 
better education and to make it more accessible to students is through 
"perestroika," or restructuring of schools.

I'm a survivor of a 12-year sentence as an inmate of public school.  I 
don't think that the trouble with public school is that what they do is 
basically good, but they just don't do it very well.  I think they're very 
good at what they do, but what they do isn't very nice to students.

I remember in my sixth-grade class how we were so eager to ask the teacher 
so many questions that she didn't have enough class time to get to us all, 
but by the time we got to high school, most of us were too discouraged to 
ask anything.  We had had enough of answers that didn't make any sense to us
because they were incomplete, out of context, meaningless to us, and boring.
Gatto says this is another one of the hidden lessons of public school:
"I teach confusion.  Even in the best schools a close examination of
curriculum turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions....
I teach children not to care too much about anything... by demanding that
they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their 
seats with anticipation, competing for my favor....  But when the bell rings
I insist that they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed to the
next work station.  They must turn off and on like a light switch.  Nothing
important is finished in any class I know of."

I had a biochemistry class in high school in which the student with the 
best grade in the class got it by copying down everything the teacher wrote 
on the board and memorizing it by rote 6 hours a day.  She did what she was 
told and rarely asked questions, always obedient and submissive.  I gave 
the teacher hell, asking questions about what I didn't understand, trying 
to figure out what she meant by what she said before I took notes.  I even 
got a technical dictionary of chemistry to help me that was really too
expensive for me to afford.  I didn't get the best test scores in that class,
but the girl who did had to follow my lead when we did lab work, and I still
remember what I learned.  She forgot it soon after she took the tests.  She
learned another lesson Gatto identifies: "I teach intellectual dependency....
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do....  The expert makes 
all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids 
can study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, 
which I then enforce....  Fortunately there are tested procedures to break 
the will of those who resist....  We've built a way of life that depends on 
people doing what they are told to do because they don't know how to tell 
THEMSELVES what to do."

There's a big problem with the so-called "self-esteem" taught in schools,
there's also a problem with most people who criticize this idea.  I think
students should be taught confidence in their ability to think, to cope 
with the basic challenges of life, in their right to be happy, to feel 
worthy, deserving, entitled to assert their needs and wants and to enjoy 
the fruits of their efforts.  I just don't see why anyone thinks that this 
is actually being taught in public school!  They don't teach self-esteem, 
they teach complacency and emotional dependency.  Our society would be much 
better off if self-esteem were taught to students, but, as Gatto says, "I 
teach that a kid's self-respect should depend on expert opinion....  The 
lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust 
themselves or their parents but instead rely on the evaluation of certified 
officials."

Public schools don't even recognize the basic right to privacy of students. 
All their belongings, their lockers, and their bodies may be searched any 
time school officials feel like it.  In many public schools they now have 
to pass through metal detectors.  Student newspapers are subject to censorship.
Let's see what Gatto has to say about this: "I teach that... one can't hide....
I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant
surveillance by myself and my colleagues.  There are no private spaces for
children, there is no private time....  Students are encouraged to tattle on
each other or even to tattle on their parents....  The meaning of constant
surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy
is not legitimate... children must be closely watched if you want to keep
a society under tight control."  If you think it's unrealistic to think
that public schools teach students to become informers and turn in their
parents, then consider former LAPD Chief Darryl Gates' "drug-education"
program, DARE, in which cops go into public school classrooms to teach students.
What do they teach them?  To turn in their parents if they use drugs, like
the little girl Ronald Reagan praised.  Since when is being an informant a
family value?  Parents aren't even permitted to sit in on DARE classes to
find out what they teach!

Public schools were never structured to teach that all men are created 
equal, that they can and deserve to live meaningful and emotionally 
satisfying lives, that their right to privacy must be recognized and 
enforced, or that they could figure out how things work with their own 
mind.  In fact, they've never been predicated upon benefiting students at 
all!  As historian and philosopher George Smith writes, "The basic 
justification... has always been 'for reasons of State.'  The welfare of 
the child has placed a distant second at best."

Many of you may have a hard time accepting all this.  You may think of ways 
in which the public schools you know about are different.  However, I think 
these differences are because schools don't go bad overnight, but through
a gradual process.  Public schools still have some good parts left because this
process isn't finished and hasn't taken full effect yet.  What is this process?
How did schools get the way they are?

Remember, public schooling is built upon the foundation of compulsory support
and attendance.  People are forced to support public schools with their taxes, 
and students are forced to go to them.  Students may be permitted to go to 
State-approved private schools, but even if they do their families are 
still forced to pay for the public schools - like the old Established
Church that everyone was forced to pay tithes to, even if they went to a
different church.

This means that public schoolteachers and other public school staff don't 
depend upon students and their families for financial support, but upon the 
politicians and bureaucrats that dole out tax revenue.  If they depended 
upon the students and their families, they'd have to satisfy them, but 
since they depend upon politicians and bureaucrats, that's who must be
satisfied.  If you accept money, you accept some control by the source of
they money, whether you get it from a corporation or the State.  Schools have
to accept State control over what students they admit, who teaches them,
and what will be taught in exchange for accepting tax money from politicians and
bureaucrats.

Think what this means.  Why should they let anything be taught that might
threaten their position?  Why should they let students be taught how to
think critically about their elected representatives?  Why should they let
students be taught any theory or history that doesn't make them look good?

Politicians and bureaucrats may have the best of intentions, but they tend to
like staying in office. So, the organizations of public school teachers and
administrative staff, such as the National Education Association or the
California Teachers' Association, try to control politicians in return by
means of campaign contributions.  The NEA is not only the biggest union in
the USA, it was also the single biggest contributor to Clinton's presidential
campaign.

The strings that come attached to money from the public purse mire public
school teachers and staff in the red tape of regulations and mandates.  The
mother of a friend of mine used to work part-time to bring public schools in
one district into compliance with all of these.  Now there is so much more
red tape that she has to work full-time to do the same job.  The main result
of the increased taxes for public schools has been an explosion in the number
of administrative staff members hired, in the schools themselves and in the
bureaucracies of the Department of Education.  Public schools have about 25
times as much administative staff as private schools do.  They have to get
paid salaries, and seniority raises, which means that the schools need to get
more money from the taxpayers, which means that they get more strings attached
and red tape to deal with... it's a vicious circle that can only end with
restructuring education, taxing ourselves into bankruptcy, or the gradual
decay of our educational system and its eventual collapse.

The best alternative is to restructure education so that schools depend upon 
students and their families once more for tuition money - not politicians 
and bureaucrats.  Nothing else will break this cycle of dependency.  As 
long as politicians and bureaucrats have control of the money that supports 
public schools, there will be a demand for it.  You might like to try 
limiting campaign contributions, but people will find loopholes and a way 
to get around such constraints as long as there's a profit in it.  Besides, 
people have the right to express themselves freely by contributing to 
whatever electoral campaign they like.

This structure is the root trouble with public education, a structure of 
centralized control over where students go to school, who teaches them, and 
what they are taught.  A structure in which those who can get enough money 
together can rent political power over the vulnerable minds of students.

There is a better way to structure education.  Instead of leaving control 
over the money in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who need 
campaign contributions to stay in office, put it in the hands of students 
and their families, so they can take control over their education for 
themselves.

The Parental Choice in Education Amendment on the California ballot this 
November will do this.  It will put the power of tuition money back into 
the hands of the people so that they can decide what's best for themselves. 
Please vote for it, tell everyone you know that cares about better 
education to do the same, and support it with all the time and money you 
can afford.

Tim Starr - Renaissance Now!

Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL,
The International Society for Individual Liberty,
1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com

Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu

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