Separation of School and State

Separation of School and State
Education: Too Important To Be Delegated to Government

Terry McIntyre

Nov 18, 2013
Karl Hess Club
karlhessclub.org

Karl Hess, Autodidact

Karl Hess “loved education, which is why [he] spent as little time as
possible in schools.” He and his mother believed that public education
was a waste of time. She taught him to read, showed him how to use the
library and how to access public records; and turned him loose; she’d
write a note excusing his absence any day he wanted to spend at home or
in the library reading, if he’d discuss what he’d read afterwards. He rarely
attended school, oﬃcially dropped out at age 15, and immediately went
to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a news-writer.

Nation At Risk - 1983

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on
America the mediocre educational performance that exists
today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it
stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.


This royal ”we” refers not to ”an unfriendly foreign power” but to the
federal, state, and local governments which actually provide and control
most education in America.


most education in America. ”Ourselves” refers to you and me and our
children, all of us who are subject to these acts of government.


most education in America. ”Ourselves” refers to you and me and our
children, all of us who are subject to these acts of government.
We, the Federal, state, and local governments, have imposed on
the children of America the mediocre educational performance
which exists today.

How Mediocre Is It? Compared to what?
◮

◮

The United States spends more per student than all others, but
international tests place it only in the middle of the pack.
Those nations and individuals who do better may actually benefit
largely from extra-governmental efforts by parents, efforts which are
officially deprecated and seldom studied.

◮

Historically, literacy rates and levels of competence in America have
declined markedly.

◮

Home-educated students score, on average, at the 85th percentile.
Compared to this, today’s schools are not even close to what they
could be.

◮

When compared to exceptional teachers (Sergio Ju´rez Correa, John
a
Taylor Gatto, Jaime Escalante, Louis Benezet), most schools are just
phoning it in. Many other hard-working teachers seem to be trapped
in a system which works even harder in the opposite direction.

Are Our Measuring Sticks Dumbed-Down?

Sample questions from the tests used to measure educational
performance are hardly rocket science:
John wants to put a fence around a rectangular garden 10 feet long and
6 feet wide. Ignoring the need for a gate, how many feet of fencing are
needed? (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP])

◮

Of the 9 year olds who took this test, only 9% got the right answer.
Among the 13 year olds, 31% stumbled upon the correct answer.

◮

The most popular wrong answers were 16 and 60.

◮

Are that many children innately incapable of simple math?

Ju´rez Sergio Correa’s class
a
Previously, 45% of the students in Correa’s class had failed the math
section on Mexico’s national exam. Not one made it to the “Excellent”
category in math. 31% had failed Spanish.

a
After spending a year with Correa, only 7% failed math, 63% were rated
“Excellent” in math. Only 3.5% failed Spanish; even their lowest
language scores were well above the national average.
Ju´rez Correa’s top math student, Paloma Noyola Bueno, had the highest
a
score in the entire nation. Ten of Correa’s students had math scores in
the 99.99th percentile. Three placed at the same high level in Spanish.

a
After spending a year with Correa, only 7% failed math, 63% were rated
“Excellent” in math. Only 3.5% failed Spanish; even their lowest
language scores were well above the national average.
Ju´rez Correa’s top math student, Paloma Noyola Bueno, had the highest
a
score in the entire nation. Ten of Correa’s students had math scores in
the 99.99th percentile. Three placed at the same high level in Spanish.
Francisco S´nchez Salazar, chief of the Regional Center of Educational
a
Development in Matamoros: “The teaching method makes little
diﬀerence.”
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

The Method of Ju´rez Sergio Correa
a

Throw out the formal rules, plans, curriculum, procedures, and tests.
Instead, ask interesting and challenging questions.
Step back, let the students do the thinking. Explain nothing until asked.
Answer questions when asked.
Does this method work? Correa’s students didn’t just ace the national
exams, they raced through, they reported that it was easy.
How does this method work? Children learn best when grappling with
interesting problems; Correa was working with their nature, not against it.

Schools Can’t Learn

◮

◮

◮

Larry Cuban, top educational researcher with decades of experience,
surveyed more than 100 years of reform eﬀorts in America, and
concluded that they were like tossing rocks into a deep pond —
impressive initial splashes which quickly faded from view.
From time to time, truly exceptional teachers — including Benezet,
Escalante, Gatto, and Correa — buck the system and show
outstanding results, but the Departments of Education, far from
welcoming such innovation, suppress it.
The problems are deep, systemic, and worldwide. Bureaucratic
institutions naturally have powerful tendencies to resist change. One
reason for this reluctance to change is economic; another is deeply
political.

Economic Calculation Problem
Socialist economies — Government ownership and control of the means
of production of goods and services — are like robots in old TV shows:
Can not compute: insufficient data. Worse, this problem cannot be
fixed by throwing more people and money at it. The richly detailed and
widely distributed information needed to plan production and distribution
can only be discovered by entrepreneurs and consumers in a genuinely
free market. It is inherently contextual, constantly changing, dependent
on particulars of time, place, knowledge, incentives, and individual values.
It is discovered as people make economic decisions based upon
assessments of value and risk, which lead to voluntary exchanges. The
data needed is not and cannot be collected in one place; it is distributed
in millions of minds, which differ in important ways. These differences are
an important part of the data, and cannot be abstracted or aggregated
away, without losing information vital to the calculation of what people
want, and how to deliver it efficiently and effectively.

When central collectivist connivers try to “nudge” or “improve”
outcomes via guaranteed funding, mandatory attendance, mandated
curriculum, Common Core, and other regulations, they interfere with and
degrade this free flow and discovery of information. Some argue that it is
useful to introduce certain (political) information, but such political
information is inferior to market information for many reasons, not least
of which is that the ends of politicians are often far from the ends of
individual consumers.

So-called “public-private partnerships” can only imitate markets; they
can’t be markets. To be efficient and innovative and effective, to have
the right data to make good economic decisions, we must have voluntary
choices of what and how to produce; and of what to purchase, from
whom, at what price.

Central Planners Need More Brains
Take away those voluntary choices, and you have something like Soviet
stores in the former USSR in the 1970s - low quality goods and services,
frequent shortages, combined with high costs of production. The entire
supply chain from raw materials to store was owned and operated by the
government. Stores and other institutions had little incentive to improve;
they were almost never shut down for poor performance. In such a forced
economy, the planners do not have access to the widely distributed
information implicit in freely-made choices. In an economic union of 293
million smart and industrious people, the Soviets behaved as if a few
thousand planners could manage everything, even when operating blind –
but economic decision-making cannot and should not be collectivized.
In the same way that the Soviets abolished farm collectivism, we should
abolish educational collectivism; we should separate school and state.

Too Radical?
Is complete separation of school and state “too radical?”
Would smaller steps — such as vouchers and tax credits and charter
schools and local control — get the job done? No, absolutely not!
Such incremental efforts sidestep the question of whether central
planning can work better or worse than voluntary exchange; worse, they
treat that question as if it were definitively settled in favor of political
interference with our lives. Minor details of that interference might be
tweaked, but not its fundamental nature. Your choices will be restricted
by the arbitrary diktats of central planners; the mutually-beneficial
entrepreneurial process will be corrupted and degraded; the vital
information needed to make good decisions will be lost; the value and
efficiency of education provided to you and yours will suffer, compared to
what you might otherwise have been free to choose.

A Deeper Question

What sort of society do we wish to live in? Do we want to live in a free
country? When, exactly, should that freedom begin? At the magic age of
18? Why not 81? Should teachers and parents and administrators also
enjoy freedom? Should we not begin by making our fundamental
institutions, including schools, free–as–in–freedom? After twelve years of
carefully regimented compulsory education, can we even imagine what
real freedom would look like?
You might ask “are there any real-life models of schools which begin with
freedom as their organizing principle?”

Democratic Free Schools

There are about 40 Democratic Free Schools in the U.S. and U.K.
Perhaps the oldest is Summerhill, a British school founded in 1921 on the
radical premise that children should be free to decide what to learn, or
even whether to learn. While Sumerhill does have a schedule of classes in
the usual subjects, children are never required to attend.
Summerhill attracted some disruptive children who weren’t doing well in
other schools. The founder, A.S. Neill, used to give these students
private therapy sessions, but stopped when he discovered that freedom
and a healthy variety of voluntary options were all the therapy needed.
The children mend on their own. The rules at Summerhill are minimal,
and are voted on equally by all, whether adult or child, in democratic
assemblies.

Sudbury Schools

Sudbury Valley School was founded in America in 1968, on the principle
that “children are already extremely good at creativity, imagination,
alertness, curiosity, thoughtfulness, responsibility and judgement. What
children lack is experience, which they can gain if adults stay out of the
way. All people are curious by nature; the most eﬃcient, long-lasting,
and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the
learner; all people are creative if allowed to develop their unique talents;
age-mixing among students promotes growth in all members of the
group; freedom is essential to the development of personal responsibility.”
(statements from their web site)

What if we free the teachers?
Home Schooling/Unschooling
About 1.5–2.5 million American children are taught at home by parents
who are far too many, too widely–dispersed, and too independent for
bureaucrats to manage in detail. Left free to experiment, these
parent–teachers often discover that what works at home is nothing like
the schools we have grown accustomed to. Children do not need to be
schooled for 6 or 8 hours per day. They do not need bells every 45
minutes. Just about everything done in schools–as–we–know–them turns
out to be superﬂuous.
On average, home-schoolers test at the 85th percentile. Even those of
“low socio-economic status” average at the 80th percentile. Home
schooling looks like that long-sought Great Equalizer of education.
For those who still go to regular schools, some of the best predictors of
success have much to do with a home culture of education, which may
actually be responsible for more educational attainment than we realize
— and which looks a lot like what home–schoolers do.

Elevators or Tar Pits?

Schools cannot eliminate the racial academic achievement gap because
schools did not create it. This gap comes to schools with children from
their homes, families and communities. The gap, which is well-established
before kindergarten, widens during the ﬁrst three years of schooling.
Philip Jackson, Black Star Project, Chicago

One Mother’s Story

I studied his IEP, and saw no way for Jimmy to get oﬀ the short bus for
“developmentally retarded” children and rejoin the others — so I
mainstreamed him and worked with him in the evenings to bring him up
to speed. Today, he’s a lawyer.
Private communication with Alice Sheets, Dean of Department of
Education, CCAC.

What If We Free The Schools?

Not every parent is willing to home–school. Nor can all parents afford
Sudbury schools — it can be hard to come up with $4000 tuition out of
our own pockets, even if this is much cheaper than the “free”
government schools. Is there any hope for them? To answer that
question, let us go abroad and look in places where governments are
poor, where government schools are much worse than ours, and where
governments do not have SWAT teams to back up their regulations and
stifle innovation. In these places, an educational revolution has been
sliding right under the radar: small, affordable, parent-funded
government-free schools in huge, ever-growing numbers.

The Beautiful Tree - Top of Reading List

The Beautiful Tree

James Tooley was studying private educational alternatives in Hyderabad,
India, and felt he was being steered toward the most expensive, elite
schools. But he was looking for a way to help the poor, not the elites.
He asked if there were any private schools for the poor. Politicians and
bureaucrats admitted that private schools existed for the middle class —
their own children went to such schools — but as for the poor, it was
unthinkable. He found similar denials everywhere he went.

The Three Denials

It is widely believed by politicians and bureaucrats in India and all around
the world, that
◮

The poor can’t aﬀord to educate their children

◮

The poor don’t care.

◮

The poor don’t know enough to evaluate the quality.

However, when tested in the real world, all three claims were false.

What Tooley Found: The Reality
◮

Thousands of parent-funded, government-free schools, where some of
the poorest people in the world pay about 10% of their income to
educate their children — who are 50-80% of students in some provinces.
About 90% of these schools were run for proﬁt, and provided 10-20% of
their seats for free. The remaining 10% of schools were subsidized
completely or partially. Some few schools also accepted small portions of
government aid.

◮

James Tooley, Pauline Dixon, and their researchers tested over 32,000
students, and found that the results of private education were superior to
competing government schools.

◮

Compelled by economic necessity, these numerous and highly
competitive schools were deeply responsive to the needs of students and
parents. Wherever children and tuition move freely, market choices
swiftly reward good schools and punish bad schools.

◮

Governments were oblivious. In one province, the government claimed
that only 60 private schools existed; Tooley’s team found over 1200.

◮

Since so many students went to non-government schools, the
“cream-skimming” theory could be tested, and was found wanting.

Reclaiming Education

If we want education to be of the highest quality, inclusive of all
children and all their varied needs, and to respond to the needs of society
and encourage life-long learning, then our current system simply cannot
deliver it. There is no point in looking any further to the State. State
intervention in education has been a cul-de-sac, a historical experiment
with the lives of children.
- James Tooley, Reclaiming Education.

James Tooley began as a liberal who wanted “better” government
schools. After decades of research, he concluded that inherently socialist
institutions cannot be reformed; they must be abolished. Government
ownership and control of schools is, in short, a serious design ﬂaw.

Market vs. Government
Andrew J. Coulson
Andrew J. Coulson, Cato Institute Fellow and author of Market
Education: The Unknown History and many papers, including a
meta–analysis: Comparing Public, Private, and Market Schools: The
International Evidence.
Across time, countries, and outcome measures, private provision of
education outshines public provision according to the overwhelming
majority of econometric studies.
It is in fact the least regulated market school systems that show the
greatest margin of superiority over state schooling.
Solutions now considered in the U.S.A. — vouchers, charter schools, and
tax credits — are already common in several Western nations, and have
led to increased regulation of private schools, due to the competing
interests of school unions, and a rather limited degree of improvement in
government schools, due largely to the need to compete with private
schools. Freedom for our schools, teachers, and students would be much
better.

Market Education: Historical Norm
The demand for mass education arose when people were no longer
scratching bare subsistence from the soil, and had leisure time.
Governments first resisted mass education — the Stamp Act was
designed to increase the cost of printing books, pamphlets, and papers.
Nevertheless, demand for education kept rising. When it became too
great to stifle, governments began to co-opt the process.
Prior to the first compulsory attendance laws (1850), Alexis de Toqueville
(author of Democracy in America) and other contemporary travelers were
astonished by the world–class quality and quantity of education in
America. Perhaps such travelers interacted only with wealthy elites?
Publishing statistics for James Fenimore Cooper, Noah Webster, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne belie this theory; J.K. Rowlings would cut off her
right arm to have such deep market penetration.
Of note is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s occupations: Editor of the
American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge.

History: Less is More
When studying mass education in early America and Britain, many
people look for evidence of students sitting at desks for twelve thousand
hours in isolated, regulation–bound cloisters. But today’s modern
conventions exist purely for political reasons. Time spent warming seats
is not an adequate measure of quality of learning.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin describes his own education:
two years of formal classes, one in grammar school, one to learn
“ciphering” (arithmetic). He did poorly at ciphering, dropped out of
school, and went to work at the age of 12. Franklin and his friends were
autodidacts; they taught themselves ﬂuency in writing, computation,
foreign languages, and many other things. Franklin became a printer,
writer, publisher, editor, inventor, scientist, and Ambassador to France.
His drive and attainments were exceptional, but his methods were not.

Education in the United States, a Documentary History.
That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair of
state is not to be denied, but what should be the character of this public
education, and how young persons should be educated, are questions
which remain to be considered. As things are, there is disagreement
about the subjects. For mankind are by no means agreed about the
things to be taught, whether we look to virtue or the best life. Neither is
it clear whether education is more concerned with intellectual or with
moral virtue.The existing practice is perplexing; no one knows on what
principle we should proceed - should the useful in life, or should virtue, or
should the higher knowledge, be the aim of our training? . . . Again,
about the means there is no agreement; for different persons, starting
with different ideas about the nature of virtue, naturally disagree about
the practice of it.
— Aristotle, Politics

Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII
- What is Not Said
No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above
all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to
the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of
government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar
character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The
character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy
creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the
government.
And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education
should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not
private — not as at present, when every one looks after his own
children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort
which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common
interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any
one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state,
and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is
inseparable from the care of the whole.[emphasis added]

Utopian Vision vs. Practical Reality

Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers known to the world, was not
taught in schools of the sort which he claimed it “is not to be denied”
and “no one will doubt,” would be right for the world. He was describing
a utopian ideal, perhaps telling his employer, Phillip of Macedonia, what
he wanted to hear.
2400 years later, passages like these are stripped of context and fed to
teachers as if they were indubitably true.
Schools in Athens were free–wheeling discussion groups, not the rigidly
programmed and structured cloisters of today. In fact, the Greek word
σκηολ; meant “leisure; free time; that in which leisure time is spent,
especially lecture, disputation, discussion; philosophy”

Athenian Regulation of Education

Schools shall open late enough, and close early enough, that students
may travel during daylight hours.
That’s it. One regulation imposed by the Athenian government.
For its five–hundred-year history from Homer to Aristotle, Athenian
civilization was a miracle in a rude world; teachers flourished there but
none were grounded in fixed buildings with regular curricula under the
thumb of an intricately layered bureaucracy. There were no schools in
Hellas. For the Greeks, study was its own reward.
— John Taylor Gatto

Beware the Context — Cui Bono?

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are
dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is “doing his English prep” and
has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not
a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years
hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition
him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a
controversy at all.
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943

Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language,
and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there
will be a considerable variation in diﬀerent schools; the parents must
judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum oﬀered . .
. Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the “supremacy of the
state” as a compulsory philosophy.
But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the
doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the “divine right
of kings”, or the “will of the people” in “democracy.” Once that doctrine
has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the
stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had
his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus
would sooner release its prey.
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model
of the totalitarian state.
— Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943

The aim of the Prussian Model of Education
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 and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality.
That is its aim in the United States, whatever pretensions of politicians,
pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
If any contrary theory is cherished among us it is simply because public
schools are still new in America, and so their true character and purpose
are but little understood. The notion that they were invented by
American patriotism and ingenuity, and go back, in fact, to the ﬁrst days
of the New England Puritans — this notion is, of course, only hollow
nonsense.
-H.L. Mencken, Review of Upton Sinclair’s The Goslings, in American
Mercury, 1924
http://www.ralphmag.org/menckenI.html

After thirty years teaching in both “good” and “bad” schools in NYC,
John Taylor Gatto had a deep sense that the school system was working
against all eﬀorts to provide real education. He wrote that
schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises
of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in
science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes.
The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey
orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane,
caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators,
but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual
contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard,
the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and
the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook
and move to a diﬀerent cell . . .
Gatto wrote several books to explore why schools and teachers —
teachers who want to do well — seem to be working at cross–purposes.
He went back to the sources:

In 1520, Martin Luther sought to revive Aristotle’s ideal, with a twist —
to conscript the young in a war with the Devil.
If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service
to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial
duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people
to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with
the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and
principalities of strong men.
In this unholy alliance, Martin Luther sought the aid of earthly
States in a spiritual war, in exchange for teaching compliance to the State.

Martin Luther thought one hour per day would be sufficient to educate
children in the essentials: reading, the Bible, and civics. Once initiated,
people were expected to take charge of their own education.

Researchers E.G. West and Andrew J. Coulson found that education in
America and the United Kingdom was voluntary and widespread up until
late in the 19th century. Compulsory attendance was demanded in
different times in different states, starting in 1850 in Massachusetts, and
culminating about 1910 in others. School reformers discovered that
children would tolerate only so much preaching and blather and “reform”
before they’d go back to their own endeavors.

2000 years after Aristotle’s observations, people still had divergent Ideas
about education. In England, there was a strong tradition of individual
liberty; education grew from the bottom-up, provided by parents,
churches, and independent ”private venture” secular schools. Parents
usually started the process, but could also delegate, just as today’s
parents might hire a ballet class or karate class. From an early age,
individuals were expected to take responsibility for their own education.
On most of the Continent, education tended to flow from the State
downward, an instrument used to shape the people. In America, this
tension between competing ideas persisted at both local and larger scales.

“Father of Education” in North Carolina
The state, in the warmth of her solicitude for their welfare, must take
charge of these children, and place them in school where their minds can
be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue.
In these schools the precepts of morality and religion shall be inculcated,
and habits of subordination and obedience will be formed.
— Archibald D. Murphey, 1816
When did parents become superﬂuous? Did I not get the memo? Who
will decide these precepts and virtues? Note the “habits of subordination
and obedience” to the State — a common theme among advocates for
government schools.
Historically, enlightenment comes during periods when neither State nor
Church could (or would) limit educational innovation.

Murphey, Regarding Discipline and Subordination

The amusements of youth may also be made auxiliary to the exactness
of discipline. All students should be taught the manual exercise, military
evolutions and manoeuvres, should be under a standing organization as a
military corps, and with proper oﬃcers to train and command them.
There can be no doubt, that much may be done in this way towards
enforcing habits of subordination and strict discipline — it will be the
province of the Board of Public Instruction, who have the general
superintending care of all the Literary Institutions of the State, to devise
for them systems of discipline and government; and your committee hope
they will discharge their duty with ﬁdelity.

The Prussian System Comes To America

If a regard to the public safety makes it right for a government to
compel the citizens to do military duty when the country is invaded, the
same reason authorizes the government to compel them to provide for
the education of their children — for no foes are so much to be dreaded
as ignorance and vice. A man has no more right to endanger the state by
throwing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children, than he has to
give admission to spies of an invading army. If he is unable to educate his
children the state should assist him — if unwilling, it should compel him.
Calvin E. Stowe, The Prussian System of Public Instruction and its
Applicability to the United States (Cincinnati, 1830)

Contrast with Thomas Jeﬀerson

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his
child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the
forcible transportation and education of the [child] against the will of his
father.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can
stand by itself.

School as Church
When calls to military ardor are insuﬃcient, there’s always the religion of
Statheism:
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right
social growth. In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true
God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
— John Dewey, Pedagogic Creed, 1897

Perhaps this was the inspiration for “One school to rule them all, one
school to ﬁnd them, one school to bring them all and in the darkness
bind them.” — which JRR Tolkien didn’t quite say.

The Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, Reloaded
Thomas Jefferson was justly pleased with the Virginia Act for Religious
Freedom. A brief summary of the main points:
◮

Our minds should be free.

◮

It is wrong to force us to pay for the propagation of ideas with which we
disagree.

◮

Those who presume to rule and to govern the contents of our minds, do
not have superior knowledge. Their coercive efforts deprive us of better
alternatives, and also deprive teachers of the benefit of our freely-made
choices.

◮

Truth itself is strong enough to defend against error
Don’t these same principles apply to schools just as much as to churches?

Don’t need (much) Education if you teach yourself
Samuel Blumenfeld researched the 117 men who signed the Declaration
of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, and
discovered one out of three had had only a few weeks of formal
schooling, and only one in four went to college.
Even the elites seldom spent 4 years in college. Thomas Jeﬀerson, one of
the most learned men in America, went to William and Mary for only two
years. Those who did go to college usually started at 16 or even 13 years
of age. Who starts college that early today? Only our homeschoolers.

One did not have to be a member of the elite to be well-educated.
Benjamin Franklin was one of 13 children; his father was a candlemaker,
a poor but highly-regarded man. Benjamin had 2 years of formal
schooling; after this, he taught himself, often in study groups with
friends. He became a highly respected publisher, writer, inventor,
scientist, and ambassador. Self-education was expected and widely
practiced by every American.

Summary
Government departments of education cannot calculate what people
want, nor how to deliver it effectively and efficiently. Reform efforts fail
for deep institutional reasons, which include a deep conflict of interest.
Cui Bono? Who benefits? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches
the watchers? Why are the very people who vote for politicians and
policies actually taught so little that is useful about politics, history, and
economics?
High rates of dropping out, home-education, and supplementary
education are indicators that government schools are not satisfying the
needs of students, who may be correct in perceiving such schools as
major impediments to learning. Many high school graduates are
unprepared for college, and colleges themselves have been dumbed down.
Top-down educational collectives neglect, marginalize, misuse, and abuse
millions of intelligent, creative brains — the brains of students, teachers,
parents, and administrators.

Liberate our children from the game.

“The only way to win the game is not to play the game” —War Games
It is time to withdraw, to liberate our schools and the minds of our
children from the State.

Separation of School and State

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