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Democratic Education

Democratic control of education, or rather control by powerful special interests, has lead to a usurpation of parent's authority and the replacement of parents' values with the values of statist indoctrinators and social experimenters.
   Sheldon Richman(1) charges, "democracy is inimical to education, if by "education" we mean the family-based assisting of children to become moral, competent, and well-rounded human beings."..."democratic rule produces schools that are unaccountable, detrimental to families, bureaucratic, and incompatible with individual freedom."
   A great injustice in democratic rule over schools is that non-parents have the same voting authority as parents, despite the parents' rights over their children and their greater understanding and concern for their child's wellbeing. Parents have little control over what gets taught in the schools; politicians, teacher's unions and bureaucrats have more control over the schools than do the parents and they impose their own agenda on education; therefore other people's values get imposed on your children. A system that decides what your children will learn and by want values, usurps the parents' authority and rob families of their freedom and responsibility. The state school system devalues the family and individual rights and thereby harms society.
   The result of politically controlled schools is that it isn't really the majority who rules the schools but powerful special interests, like the teachers unions and small oligarchies, school boards, who have an agenda that is often inconsistent with the parents. Last year the Board of Education of Lyndhurst, New Jersey "sued three government watchdogs, accusing them of harassing school officials with requests for information," it was reported.(9) "The board asked a judge to bar the three from seeking certain kinds of data. A state Superior Court judge dismissed the suit this year."
   Statist schools "are not the agents of parents and their children." Declared Sheldon Richman,(1) "Others besides them pay and therefore help call the tune. That inevitably turns the schools into laboratories for social engineering."
   "Democratic control of schools...usurps parents' child-raising authority. The big decisions - such as the selection of schools and curricula - are made by others...[politically controlled] schools rob families of essential freedom and responsibility." Said Richman.(1) "Considering that the most critical factor in the success or failure of children's education is the family, a school system that devitalizes families would seem a particularly self-defeating institution."
   The government or parents trying to impose their will on others are both wrong, parents taking away control from other parents and using it to fight over who's ideas will be imposed is wrong, it sets the worst of examples for the children, this is not the way civilized people should behave. Rather than parents fighting it out to decide what will be imposed on each other's children; all parents (with input by their children) must be free to decide where they want their children to go to school and what they want them to be taught and by what standard of values.
   There is no answer that will apply to all students as to what should be taught or how it should be taught or what books should be in the library. Students, under the guidance of parents, must decide for themselves what kind of education they want to seek to shape their own futures.
   Richman(1) says, "In school districts throughout the nation, communities are torn over such issues as whether condoms should be distributed, whether young children should be exposed to the issue of homosexuality, whether books offensive to parents should be required reading, whether reading should be taught by the "whole language" method instead of phonics, whether and what values shall be taught, and so on. Since a majority vote of school board members decides those controversies, parents represented by members voting in the minority are effectively disfranchised."
   Its controversial to teach creationism in school, but what about other myths, such as the myth of the nation-state as some kind of living organism or the embodiment of the people, or the myth of democracy as a legitimate form of government, mob rule sold as justification for any atrocity, or the myth of military glory, or the myth of a free country? How about telling the truth about those things or allow children to be exposed to someone who will tell them the truth? Allowing the truth to be told will shatter those myths forever.

An Excerpt from What's So Great About Democracy? by Sheldon Richman, July 1996
"The devotion to democracy is most clear in the matter of education. Lots of people like the fact that they vote for school boards and that schools are in the democratic arena. I like to ask them why they don't then support democratic rule for religion. Why not vote on which places of worship we'll all go to, or whether we'll go at all? Wouldn't it be wonderful if the community spoke with one voice in that important matter? If the democratic process is good enough for education, it's surely good enough for religion, which is closely related, after all."...
   "Maybe people intuitively grasp what would happen if we moved religion from the private sector to the democratic arena. A lot would be riding on the votes. We'd all feel threatened: if our preference lost, our consciences would be violated. No one likes that, so people would be prepared to argue vigorously for their positions at public meetings. They would look at their opponents as enemies plotting to force them to accept beliefs against their will. Their opponents would see them the same way. Mistrust and rancor would grow. Social relations would be characterized by increasing animosity. In the name of community solidarity, we would produce destructive fragmentation. Not the fragmentation of people peacefully attending their own places of worship (or none at all), but rather, the violent fragmentation of mutual distrust and conflict of interest." - Sheldon Richman

Time.com(10) who complained that: "Home schooling forsakes [democracy in education] by defining education not as the pursuit of an entire community but as the work of one family and its chosen circle. Which can be great. Despite some drawbacks, there are signs that home-schooling parents are doing a better job than public schools at teaching their kids. But as the number of kids learning at home grows, we should pause to wonder: Better at teaching them what? Home schooling may turn out better students, but does it create better citizens?"
   The reason why so many parents are taking their kids out of the public schools is to save them from the moral corruption of those political indoctrination centers whose purpose is to engineer obedient citizens rather than to produce good, responsible human beings or successful students. A citizen is both a slave and a co-conspirator in the crimes of the state. In public schools, young citizens are taught to obey the tyranny that is at war against everyone's rights, they are taught lies about the history of their country, they are taught that political mass murder in war is glorious national defense, they're taught that their national-cult is superior to other nations and that the lives of members of their own nation are more valuable than other human lives. Students are taught to participate in the criminal organization that is passed off as "government" as they are instructed in the plunder of a system that robs everyone and then awards the spoils to those special interest groups who learn to compete for those handouts through the corrupt political system. Students are taught that whatever rights they have been granted come from the state who has a superior right to violate those rights or take them away at any time, they are, in fact, taught that no one has any rights at all, except to join together collectively to violate other people's rights. The political schools are abusive, morally corrupting instruments of evil that take innocent children and corrupt their characters.
   In fact, many home-schooled students participate actively in community service, church groups, private clubs and are more involved in their communities and helping other people than the typical selfish slackers who attend public schools. In the most positive sense of the word "citizens" -- those who are involved in building a better community and helping others, they are better private citizens than the pejorative statist "citizens."
   Does democracy lead to raising responsible freedom loving people? Not a chance. More and more schools around the country are making "community service" mandatory, and using the conscripts to promote leftists causes. California Governor Gray Davis suggested that the state's colleges make "community service" a graduation requirement. His threat was immediately endorsed by the Los Angeles Times.
   Thomas Sowell(3) wondered why there was no sense of irony in forcing students to volunteer, he said, "Forced to volunteer. That is the Orwellian notion to which contemporary liberalism has sunk."
   "What could be wrong," the L.A. Times asks, "with teaching students, as the governor puts it, that 'a service ethic ... (has) lasting value in California?'" A community service requirement "could reap a valuable return in a new generation of civically minded citizens."
   Involuntary servitude is unconstitutional, the myth that the Civil War was fought to end slavery is exposed by the fact that slavery in the form of forced taxation and conscription has continued as does the threat of other forced labor in the future. Mandatory servitude is the tool of totalitarian regimes.
   Mr. Sowell (3)wrote, "Here we get to the heart of the so-called community service idea. Its central purpose is to create a certain set of attitudes in the students. It is compulsory submission to state-sponsored propaganda for the liberals' vision of the world."..."What is wrong with the idea of a free people, using their own time as they see fit, for those things that matter most to them, instead of being pawns in a propaganda program more in keeping with what happens in totalitarian societies?" He said, "What is wrong with each individual defining for himself or herself what being civic minded means, instead of having the government define it and impose it?"..."why must students be drafted to become "volunteers" for environmentalism or other causes dear to the heart of the Los Angeles Times or Governor Davis? The casual arrogance of those who define for other people what is a "community service" is breathtaking."

"One doesn't diminish a home-schooling parent's sacrifice for his child to note that he may also be abdicating some of his responsibilities to his community, Time(10) wrote, "the drain of families is eroding something more precious: public confidence in the schools."
   The public schools have betrayed children and their parents, they have become so obsessed with political indoctrination that serves the selfish interests of the powerful groups who have lobbied to get their curricula imposed on students that the public schools are now more interested in teaching "politically correct" dogma than educating kids or serving the community.
   Linda Bowles(4) wrote, "What could be more clear than that we are in a fateful war with counterculture socialists, whose goals are to erase moral distinctions between right and wrong, subvert religion, undermine the traditional family, invalidate the Constitution, foster militant, anti-American multiculturalism, promote a one-world government, and produce an egalitarian, collectivist society? What could be clearer than that the minds, souls and bodies of our children are the battlegrounds of this war?"

"A crucial difference between real parents and these self-appointed political parents is that most actual fathers and mothers view their parental duties as steppingstones to that day when their children will have matured into adults themselves, ready to bear the responsibilities of personal independence." Wrote Richard Ebeling,(2) "Our political parents, however, implicitly view us as perpetual, immature minors never reaching an age at which we would finally act on our own, able and required to bear both our successes and our failures."

To completely indoctrinate the populace requires an education monopoly to make sure that no politically incorrect messages are taught anywhere. Home schooling was illegal in many states until the 1980s and '90s, when a well-organized movement, lead by evangelical Christians, overturned those restrictions. Today, all U.S. states begrudgingly recognize the right of parents to home-school their children.
   Centralized education departments impose uniform standards and make decisions about how all schools will operate, what they will teach, what programs they will offer, they design curricula and determine teaching methods in an antiquated system that no longer works. We live in a time that demands freedom, flexibility, choice and competition, where teachers and education organizations must adapt their curricula and programs to fit the changing desires and needs of their consumers; the students, and provide a high quality product to stay in business.
   American colleges are best in the world, but American primary and secondary schools are among the worst in the industrialized world. If only they would liberate students and educators so they can have choice in a competitive market, American primary and secondary schools would soon lead the world.
   Today, students memorize material, they're not taught critical thinking skills or independent thinking, they are treated as subjects into which to program data, they're indoctrinated with well controlled facts and tested about how well they have been indoctrinated. The system trains them not to question the facts, not to think independently.
   Outcome based education is where they won't allow students to achieve up to each one's highest abilities with high standards set for all, instead they set the standards at the lowest common denominator where geniuses and slackers are considered equal, because they don't want any student to feel inferior. This cheats everyone, it cheats the gifted students who are held back, it cheats the average students who are kept in mediocrity and cheats the poor students who are never challenged to do better.
   The state does such a poor job at education that non-specialists (parents) do a better job than those who are trained educators.

Albert Jay Nock warned that like with bad money, bad education would drive out the good. Mass-education, he said, did nothing more than reduce the quality of education to "the dreadful average." He said, "our whole educational system has watered down its requirements to something precious near the moron standard." He believed that the main problem with the American educational system was that, in attempting to educate everyone equally, it ended up educating no one adequately. He believed that "the study of history, like other formative studies, does not even rise to the dignity of being a waste of time. What with the political, economic and theological capital that has to be made of it...it is a positive detriment to mind and spirit" (6)
   Nock understood the difference between 'an individual' and 'a citizen of a State,' so he recognized that politically controlled schools were more interested in turning out good citizens than good individuals. Educated people were more likely to question the political system. He wrote, "Education... leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life... and it begets dissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simple returns. A good income, a home and family, the usual run of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressed only to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation -- training not only makes directly for getting these, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present society has to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does, and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this"..."When you educate a man, you send him "out to shift for himself with a champagne appetite amidst a gin-guzzling society"(6)

Richman(7) says political schools "display all the features of classic bureaucracies: poor service, inefficiency, bloated budgets, empire-building, turf-protection, capture by special interests such as teachers unions, and more." He says, since they "procure their revenue and students by compulsion, and do not face a profit-and-loss test, the normal accountability of a firm to its customers is absent. Simply put, parents cannot take their business elsewhere."
   According to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, about one fourth of new teachers are unqualified. Many teachers did not complete their licensing requirements and about one fifth of teachers don't even have a minor degree in their primary teaching areas.
   By failing to teach basic skills that are necessary for an individual to be able to function independently and by refusing to instill individual responsibility and respect for the rights of others, the political schools rob students of the ability to think critically, or even responsibility, and in its stead, encourage students to think collectively.
   Political schools advance the anti-family, homosodomite and feminazi agenda, socialism and environmental extremism. Students have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. Students have been forced to undergo humiliating strip searches and pelvic exams without their consent or parental permission. Students have been exposed to violence, pornography and corrupting immorality taught as part of the state approved curriculum while being threatened with violence by the school if they refuse to attend. The politicians are holding our children captive in abusive, morally corrupting, mind-damaging, life-ruining, crime-breeding indoctrination centers.
   But maybe that's not such a bad thing according to Time.com(10) who complained that one of the problems with home-schooling is that kids are not exposed to enough negative peer pressure to get them into trouble: "Despite its growing acceptance, there are nagging shortcomings to home schooling. If you spend time with home schoolers, you get a sense that some of them have missed out on whole swaths of childhood; the admirable efforts by their parents to ensure their education and safety sometimes seem to have gone too far. In 1992 psychotherapist Larry Shyers did a study while at the University of Florida in which he closely examined the behavior of 35 home schoolers and 35 public schoolers. He found that home schoolers were generally more patient and less competitive. They tended to introduce themselves to one another more; they didn't fight as much. And the home schoolers were much more prone to exchange addresses and phone numbers. In short, they behaved like miniature adults...Or consider Rachel Ahern, 21, of Grand Junction, Colo., who never set foot in a classroom until she went to Harvard at 18. As a child, she socialized with older kids and adults at church and in music classes at a nearby college. "I never once experienced peer pressure," she says. But is that a good thing? Megan Wallace of Atlanta says if she had gone to high school, "I would have gotten into so much trouble." One could argue that kids need to get into a certain amount of trouble to learn how to handle temptations and their consequences."
   The consequences of putting kids into public schools is, for some of them, drug addiction, crime, failure and early death. According to Sheldon Richman(7) "More than 100,000 high school students take guns to class every day; 5% of the population cannot fill out a job application; 13% are considered "illiterate"; 20% are considered "functionally incompetent"; 34% are considered "marginally competent"; and 80% cannot look at a bus schedule and determine what time the next bus arrives."

One of the primary purposes of political education is the suppression of national-ethnic culture and the complete absorption of minority ethnic groups into the majority culture. The purpose of the schools is to force those ethnic groups to abandon their culture, language and religion if it deviates from the preferred religion of the majority or the interests of the state. In countries where ethnic minorities have suffered oppression by having their children forcibly indoctrinated into the majority culture there has developed deep seated resentment which sowed the seeds for eventual rebellion and war as the people faced extinction of their culture.
   Murray Rothbard(8) reminds us that "the very nature of the public school requires the imposition of uniformity and the stamping out of diversity and individuality in education."
   Ludwig von Mises said, "continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace."..."The question of which language is to be made the basis of instruction assumes crucial importance. A decision one way or the other can, over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area. The school can alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong and can be used as a means of oppressing whole nationalities. Whoever controls the schools has the power to injure other nationalities and to benefit his own."
   Murray Rothbard wrote that "one of the major motivations of the legion of mid-nineteenth-century American "educational reformers" who established the modern public school system was precisely to use it to cripple the cultural and linguistic life of the waves of immigrants into America, and to mould them...into "one people. ". . . In particular to smash the parochial school system of the Catholics." (8) (p.125)
   Murray Rothbard wrote that "in colonial days, public schooling was used as a device to suppress religious dissent, as well as to imbue unruly servants with the virtues of obedience to the state." (8) (p.123)
   Majority Protestants in America have numerous times discriminated against other religions by forbidding them to establish their own schools, as the majority prohibited the Quakers, the Mormons in certain areas in the east and the "New Light" movement from operating their own schools in some places.
   Fred Foldvary(5) wrote, "The extreme historical example was taking away the children of American Indians and putting them in boarding schools where they were made to abandon their native language and culture. This points out the reason for "public" or government education: the homogenization of America, making standardized Americans out of Indians and immigrants. School choice was deliberately rejected in order to create a uniform indoctrination of the values of the authorities."
   On November 7, 1922 the state of Oregon outlawed private schools and ordered all children to be captured and forced into the public schools. This bill was strongly promoted by the Ku Klux Klan who wanted to crush Catholic schools. It was overturned by the Supreme Court in the case of (Pierce v Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925). The court ruled that "the child is not the mere creature of the state," saying that the statute violated the "fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose."
 
There are many forms of education, newspapers, magazines, books, television shows are all forms of education. Should the state monopolize the printing and broadcasting industries to make sure that children receive the proper education through the media? Should they forbid the right parents to choose the kind of books their children will read or the TV shows their children will watch? In authoritarian countries, the rulers realize that to totally control education they must control the press as well. The degree of censorship that exists in the United States compared to totalitarian states is merely a matter of degree. American politicians are willing to censor and regulate the free exchange of knowledge up to a certain point, the age of 18, and along the way violate both the rights of the children and their parents, but this attitude leads some American politicians to extend that control even further, into college and adulthood, which they do by usurping the parent's authority. Monopoly political control  over education poses a permanent threat to the future of freedom that paves the way for tyranny in other areas of life by indoctrinating the subjects into obedience to arbitrary dictates.
   Isabel Paterson wrote that "every politically controlled education 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.
   The tax-supported, compulsory education system is the complete model of the totalitarian state." - Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine

A common mantra for the public school system is; "we are teaching the future leaders of our country, by investing in education, we're investing in the future of America" which is parroted like playing back a recorded message. The leaders of the country are leading their mindless followers steadily down the road to totalitarianism. Those leaders are themselves as ignorant of free enterprise government and all the ways to raise revenue for public works without taxation and solve society's problems in a consensual system as their followers. They have been taught lies about the constitution, lies about the true nature of human rights, unsound economic policy and fallacies about political regulation and they pass on those frauds when they grow up to take places of responsibility. Their ignorance harms everyone, violates fundamental human rights, puts millions of innocent people in prison and kill others. So where's the value in their education? They're not investing in a good education that will produce a better country. They're only investing in the future of tyranny by instilling the one necessary ingredient in the people for tyranny to prevail -- ignorance.

--Libertocracy Association; July 14, 2001 (9/8/5001) (update; Sep. 23, 2001)                                                                                          by Libercratus

"Consider public (state) schooling. I challenge anyone to show me a better model of socialistic central planning than public schooling. A central board of elected or appointed government commissars, whether at a national, state, or local level, plans, in a top-down fashion, the educational decisions of thousands or even millions of people. School attendance is mandatory by law,
and school funding is based on the Marxian principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Students are taught by government-approved schoolteachers using government-approved textbooks following a government-approved curriculum." -- State Department Confusion over Liberty - Jacob G. Hornberger; FFF EMAIL UPDATE: The Future of Freedom Foundation: September 6, 2001

• "Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks."
• "Gain control of all student newspapers."
• "Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
• "Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis."
• "Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce."
• "Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents."

In 386 BC, Plato devised a blueprint for communistic totalitarianism, the Republic, which is a manifesto of absolute evil that was to be implemented through compulsory education designed to destroy the family and parental control, to pervert the relationship between the sexes and instill immorality in children to be exploited by the political rulers who will use those human resources to carry out their crimes. He wrote that society must be perverted away from the natural relationship between man and womin and the family must be destroyed in order for the state to have absolute power over the the lives of its subjects. He wrote: "All above ten years of age in the city must be taken out into the country, and all the children among them (infants through age ten) must be taken charge of (by the state) and kept outside their present surroundings and the ways of life led by their parents, and the reformers must bring them up in their own ways and customs."
   Lenin bragged: "Give me a child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever."
   Adolph Hitler declared: "In my great educative work, I am beginning with the young."
   Khrushchev wrote: "Like every other form of state-directed activity in the Soviet Union, education is conceived as a weapon serving the interests of the Communist Party and dedicated to a single objective - - the victory of the Soviet system."

"If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: 'By what means do you know that we are not?'" - Ayn Rand; Atlas Shrugged (p. 959) voice of John Galt

Archibald D. Murphey, the founder of the public school system in North Carolina laid out his plans for public schooling: "All children will be taught in them. . . In the schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed... Their parents know not how to instruct them.... The state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children, and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts be trained to virtue."

"To ensure the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to ensure that the public's consent would be engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries move to seize control over education, over the minds of men: over the universities, and over general education through compulsory school attendance laws and a network of public schools. The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to the State as well as other civic virtues among their young charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education insured that one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would be the nation's teachers and professional educationists." - Murray Rothbard; For a New Liberty: (p. 12)

1 - Education vs. Democracy, by Sheldon Richman; Future of Freedom Foundation
2 - Imagining Freedom for the 21st Century: A Presidential Candidate's Press Conference, Part 2 -
by Richard M. Ebeling; Freedom Daily: July 2000
3 - Forced to volunteer - Thomas Sowell; Jewish World Review August 9, 1999
4 - Values Matter Most - Linda Bowles; WorldNetDaily, May 16, 2000
5 - School Choice - Fred Foldvary; The Progress Report
6 - Nock, Albert Jay. The Book of Journeyman. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969
7 - Public Schools and the Assault on the Family - Sheldon Richman, Future of Freedom Foundation, Feb. 1996
8 - For a New Liberty - Murray Rothbard; p. 126
9 - Town may place limit on clapping at meetings - Jennifer Blenner; The Record; Bergen County (North Jersey Media Group Inc.) August 13, 2001
10 - Home Sweet School - John Cloud and Jodie Morse; Time.com: week of Aug. 20, 2001

Copyright © 2001 (5001) The Libertocracy© Association. All rights reserved.