Uniformity or Diversity?

While current educationists do not go as far as the Ku Klux Klan, it is important to realize that the very nature of the public school requires the imposition of uniformity and the stamping out of diversity and individuality in education.

For it is in the nature of any governmental bureaucracy to live by a set of rules, and to impose those rules in a uniform and heavy-handed [p. 127] manner. If it did not do so, and the bureaucrat were to decide individual cases ad hoc, he would then be accused, and properly so, of not treating each taxpayer and citizen in an equal and uniform manner. He would be accused of discrimination and of fostering special privilege. Furthermore, it is administratively more convenient for the bureaucrat to establish uniform rules throughout his jurisdiction. In contrast to the private, profit-making business, the government bureaucrat is neither interested in efficiency nor in serving his customers to the best of his ability. Having no need to make profits and sheltered from the possibility of suffering losses, the bureaucrat can and does disregard the desires and demands of his consumer-customers. His major interest is in “not making waves,” and this he accomplishes by even-handedly applying a uniform set of rules, regardless of how inapplicable they may be in any given case.

The public school bureaucrat, for his part, is faced with a host of crucial and controversial decisions in deciding on the pattern of formal schooling in his area. He must decide: Should schooling be — traditional or progressive? free enterprise or socialistic? competitive or egalitarian? liberal arts or vocational? segregated or integrated? sex education or not? religious or secular? or various shades between these poles. The point is that whatever he decides, and even if he decides according to the wishes of the majority of the public, there will always be a substantial number of parents and children who will be totally deprived of the kind of education they desire. If the decision is for traditional discipline in the schools, then the more progressive-minded parents lose out, and vice versa; and the same is true for all the other critical decisions. The more that education becomes public, the more will parents and children be deprived of the education they feel they need. The more that education becomes public, the more will heavy-handed uniformity stamp out the needs and desires of individuals and minorities.

Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life. For if one agency is going to make the decision: sex education or no, traditional or progressive, integrated or segregated, etc., then it becomes particularly important to gain control of the government and to prevent one’s adversaries from taking power themselves. Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.

Contrast the deprivation and intense social conflict inherent in government decision-making with the state of affairs on the free market. If [p. 128] education were strictly private, then each and every group of parents could and would patronize its own kind of school. A host of diverse schools would spring up to meet the varied structure of educational demands by parents and children. Some schools would be traditional, others progressive. Schools would range through the full traditional-progressive scale; some schools would experiment with egalitarian and gradeless education, others would stress the rigorous learning of subjects and competitive grading; some schools would be secular, others would emphasize various religious creeds; some schools would be libertarian and stress the virtues of free enterprise, others would preach various kinds of socialism.

Let us consider, for example, the structure of the magazine or book publishing industry today, remembering too that magazines and books are themselves an extremely important form of education. The magazine market, being roughly free, contains all manner of magazines to suit a wide variety of tastes and demands by consumers: there are nationwide, all-purpose magazines; there are liberal, conservative, and all manner of ideological journals; there are specialized scholarly publications; and there are a myriad of magazines devoted to special interests and hobbies like bridge, chess, hi-fi, etc. A similar structure appears in the free book market: there are wide-circulation books, books appealing to specialized markets, books of all ideological persuasions. Abolish public schools, and the free, varied, and diverse magazine and book markets would be parallelled by a similar kind of “school market.” In contrast, if there were only one magazine for each city or state, think of the battles and conflicts that would rage: Should the magazine be conservative, liberal, or socialist; how much space should it devote to fiction or bridge, etc.? The pressures and conflicts would be intense, and no resolution would be satisfactory, for any decision would deprive countless numbers of people of what they want and require. What the libertarian is calling for, then, is not as outré as it might at first appear; what he is calling for is a school system as free and varied as most other educational media are today.

To focus again on other educational media, what then would we think of a proposal for the government, federal or state, to use the taxpayers’ money to set up a nationwide chain of public magazines or newspapers, and then to compel all people, or all children, to read them? Further, what would we think of the government outlawing all other newspapers and magazines, or at the very least outlawing all newspapers or magazines that do not come up to certain “standards” of what a government commission thinks children ought to read? Such a proposal would surely [p. 129] be regarded with horror throughout the country, yet this is precisely the sort of regime that government has established in the schools. A compulsory public press would rightly be considered an invasion of the basic freedom of the press; is not scholastic freedom at least as important as press freedom? Aren’t both vital media for public information and education, for free inquiry and search for the truth? In fact, the suppression of free schooling should be regarded with even greater horror than the suppression of a free press, since here the tender and unformed minds of children are more directly involved.

It is intriguing that at least some public school advocates have recognized the analogy between schooling and the press and have pursued their logic to the latter area. Thus, prominent in Boston politics in the 1780s and 1790s was the arch-Federalist “Essex Junto,” a group of leading merchants and lawyers originally hailing from Essex County, Massachusetts. The Essexmen were particularly anxious for an extensive public school system in order to have the youth “taught the proper subordination.” Essexman Stephen Higginson frankly declared that “the people must be taught to confide in and revere their rulers.” And seeing with firm consistency that newspapers were as important a form of education as formal schooling, another leading Essex merchant and theoretician, Jonathan Jackson, denounced the free press for being necessarily subservient to its readership, and advocated a state-owned newspaper that could be independent of its readers and therefore inculcate the proper virtues into the citizenry.12

Professor E. G. West has also offered an instructive analogy between the provision of schooling and of food, surely an industry of at least an equal importance for children as well as adults. West writes:

Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes or rates in order to provide children’s food, “free” at local authority kitchens or shops. It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestioningly accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that for “administrative reasons” parents were allocated to those shops which happened to be nearest their homes . . . . Yet strange as such hypothetical measures may appear when [p. 130] applied to the provision of food and clothing they are nevertheless typical of . . . state education . . . . 13

Several libertarian thinkers, from “left-” and “right”-wing ends of the libertarian spectrum, have delivered trenchant critiques of the totalitarian nature of compulsory public schooling. Thus, left-libertarian British critic Herbert Read:

Mankind is naturally differentiated into many types, and to press all these types into the same mold must inevitably lead to distortions and repressions. Schools should be of many kinds, following different methods and catering for different dispositions. It might be argued that even a totalitarian state must recognize this principle but the truth is that differentiation is an organic process, the spontaneous and roving associations of individuals for particular purposes . . . . The whole structure of education as the natural process we have envisaged, falls to pieces if we attempt to make that structure . . . artificial.14

And the great late-nineteenth-century individualist English philosopher Herbert Spencer asked:

For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly to fit the people for social life — to make them good citizens? And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this — a government ought to mold children into good citizens . . . . It must first form for itself a definite conception of a pattern citizen; and having done this, must elaborate such system of discipline as seems best calculated to produce citizens after that pattern. This system of discipline it is bound to enforce to the uttermost. For if it does otherwise, it allows men to become different from what in its judgment they should become, and therefore fails in that duty it is charged to fulfill.15

And the twentieth-century American individualist writer Isabel Paterson declared:

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 [p. 131] 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.16

As E. G. West indicated, bureaucratic convenience has invariably led the states to prescribe geographical public school districts, to place one school in each district, and then to force each public school child to attend school in the district closest to his residence. While in a free private school market most children would undoubtedly attend schools near their homes, the present system compels a monopoly of one school per district, and thereby coerces uniformity throughout each area. Children who, for whatever reason, would prefer to attend a school in another district are prohibited from doing so. The result is enforced geographic homogeneity, and it also means that the character of each school is completely dependent on its residential neighborhood. It is then inevitable that public schools, instead of being totally uniform, will be uniform within each district, and the composition of pupils, the financing of each school, and the quality of education will come to depend upon the values, the wealth, and the tax base, of each geographical area. The fact that wealthy school districts will have costlier and higher-quality teaching, higher teaching salaries, and better working conditions than the poorer districts, then becomes inevitable. Teachers will regard the better schools as the superior teaching posts, and the better teachers will gravitate to the better school districts, while the poorer ones must remain in the lower-income areas. Hence, the operation of district public schools inevitably results in the negation of the very egalitarian goal which is supposed to be a major aim of the public school system in the first place.

Moreover, if the residential areas are racially segregated, as they often tend to be, the result of a compulsory geographical monopoly is the compulsory racial segregation of the public schools. Those parents who prefer integrated schooling have to come up against the geographical monopoly system. Furthermore, just as some wag has said that nowadays “Whatever isn’t prohibited is compulsory,” the recent tendency of the public school bureaucrats has not been to institute voluntary busing of children to widen parental discretion, but to swing in the opposite direction and institute compulsory busing and compulsory racial integration [p. 132] of the schools — often resulting in a grotesque transfer of children far from their homes. Once again, the typical government pattern: either compulsory segregation or compulsory integration. The voluntary way — leaving the decisions up to the individual parents involved — cuts across the grain of any State bureaucracy.

It is curious that recent movements for local parental control of public education have sometimes been called “extreme right-wing” and at other times “extreme left-wing,” when the libertarian motivation has been precisely the same in either case. Thus, when parents have opposed the compulsory busing of their children to distant schools, the educational Establishment has condemned these movements as “bigoted” and “right-wing.” But when, similarly, Negro parents — as in the case of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in New York City — have demanded local parental control of the school system, this drive in its turn has been condemned as “extreme left-wing” and “nihilistic.” The most curious part of the affair is that the parents in both cases have failed to recognize their common desire for local parental control, and have themselves condemned the “bigots” or “militants” in the other group. Tragically, neither the local white nor black groups have recognized their common cause against the educational Establishment: against dictatorial control of their children’s education by an educational bureaucracy which is trying to ram down their throats a form of schooling which it believes must be imposed upon the recalcitrant masses. One crucial task of libertarians is to highlight the common cause of all groups of parents against the State’s educational tyranny. Of course, it must also be pointed out that parents can never get the State off their educational backs until the public school system is totally abolished and schooling becomes free once more.

The geographical nature of the public school system has also led to a coerced pattern of residential segregation, in income and consequently in race, throughout the country and particularly in the suburbs. As everyone knows, the United States since World War II has seen an expansion of population, not in the inner central cities, but in the surrounding suburban areas. As new and younger families have moved to the suburbs, by far the largest and growing burden of local budgets has been to pay for the public schools, which have to accommodate a young population with a relatively high proportion of children per capita. These schools invariably have been financed from growing property taxation, which largely falls on the suburban residences. This means that the wealthier the suburban family, and the more expensive its home, the greater will be its tax contribution for the local school. Hence, as [p. 133] the burden of school taxes increases steadily, the suburbanites try desperately to encourage an inflow of wealthy residents and expensive homes, and to discourage an inflow of poorer citizens. There is, in short, a breakeven point of the price of a house beyond which a new family in a new house will more than pay for its children’s education in its property taxes. Families in homes below that cost level will not pay enough in property taxes to finance their children’s education and hence will throw a greater tax burden on the existing population of the suburb. Realizing this, suburbs have generally adopted rigorous zoning laws which prohibit the erection of housing below a minimum cost level — and thereby freeze out any inflow of poorer citizens. Since the proportion of Negro poor is far greater than white poor, this effectively also bars Negroes from joining the move to the suburbs. And since in recent years there has been an increasing shift of jobs and industry from the central city to the suburbs as well, the result is an increasing p ressure of unemployment on the Negroes — a pressure which is bound to intensify as the job shift accelerates. The abolition of the public schools, and therefore of the school burden-property tax linkage, would go a long way toward removing zoning restrictions and ending the suburb as an upper middle-class-white preserve.

• 12See David Hackett Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” William and Mary Quarterly (April 1964), pp. 191-235. Also see Murray N. Rothbard, “Economic Thought: Comment,” in D. T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1700-1825 (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1967), pp. 178-79.
• 13E. G. West, Education and the State (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965), pp. 13-14.
• 14Herbert Read, The Education of Free Men (London: Freedom Press, 1944), pp. 27-28.
• 15Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (London: John Chapman, 1851), pp. 332-33.
• 16Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1943), pp. 257-58.