For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

Until the last few years there were few institutions in America that were held more sacred — especially by liberals — than the public school. Devotion to the public school had seized even those early Americans — such as Jeffersonians and Jacksonians — who were libertarian in most other respects. In recent years the public school was supposed to be a crucial ingredient of democracy, the fount of brotherhood, and the enemy of elitism and separateness in American life. The public school was the embodiment of the alleged right of every child to an education, and it was upheld as a crucible of understanding and harmony between men of all occupations and social classes who would rub elbows from an early age with all their neighbors.

Going hand in hand with the spread of public education have been compulsory attendance laws, which have forced all children up to a high — and continually increasing — minimum age, to attend either a public school or a private school certified as suitable by the state apparatus. In contrast to earlier decades, when a relatively small proportion of the population went to school in the higher grades, the entire mass of the population has thus been coerced by the government into spending a large portion of the most impressionable years of their lives in public institutions. We could easily have analyzed compulsory attendance laws [p. 120] in our chapter on involuntary servitude, for what institution is more evidently a vast system of incarceration? In recent years, Paul Goodman and other critics of education have trenchantly exposed the nation’s public schools — and to a lesser extent their private appendages — as a vast prison system for the nation’s youth, dragooning countless millions of unwilling and unadaptable children into the schooling structure. The New Left tactic of breaking into the high schools shouting “Jailbreak!” may have been absurd and ineffective, but it certainly expressed a great truth about the school system. For if we are to dragoon the entire youth population into vast prisons in the guise of “education,” with teachers and administrators serving as surrogate wardens and guards, why should we not expect vast unhappiness, discontent, alienation, and rebellion on the part of the nation’s youth? The only surprise should be that the rebellion was so long in coming. But now it is increasingly acknowledged that something is terribly wrong with America’s proudest institution; that, especially in urban areas, the public schools have become cesspools of crime, petty theft, and drug addiction, and that little or no genuine education takes place amidst the warping of the minds and souls of the children.1

Part of the reason for this tyranny over the nation’s youth is misplaced altruism on the part of the educated middle class. The workers, or the “lower classes,” they felt, should have the opportunity to enjoy the schooling the middle classes value so highly. And if the parents or the children of the masses should be so benighted as to balk at this glorious opportunity set before them, well, then, a little coercion must be applied — “for their own good,” of course.

A crucial fallacy of the middle-class school worshippers is confusion between formal schooling and education in general. Education is a lifelong process of learning, and learning takes place not only in school, but in all areas of life. When the child plays, or listens to parents or friends, or reads a newspaper, or works at a job, he or she is becoming educated. Formal schooling is only a small part of the educational process, and is really only suitable for formal subjects of instruction, particularly in the more advanced and systematic subjects. The elementary subjects, reading, writing, arithmetic and their corollaries, can easily be learned at home and outside the school.

Furthermore, one of the great glories of mankind is its diversity, the [p. 121] fact that each individual is unique, with unique abilities, interests, and aptitudes. To coerce into formal schooling children who have neither the ability nor the interest in this area is a criminal warping of the soul and mind of the child. Paul Goodman has raised the cry that most children would be far better off if they were allowed to work at an early age, learn a trade, and begin to do that which they are most suited for. America was built by citizens and leaders, many of whom received little or no formal schooling, and the idea that one must have a high-school diploma — or nowadays, an A.B. degree — before he can begin to work and to live in the world is an absurdity of the current age. Abolish compulsory attendance laws and give children their head, and we will return to a nation of people far more productive, interested, creative, and happy. Many thoughtful opponents of the New Left and the youth rebellion have pointed out that much of the discontent of youth and their divorce from reality is due to the ever-longer period in which youth must remain at school, wrapped in a cocoon of dependence and irresponsibility. Well and good, but what is the main reason for this ever-lengthening cocoon? Clearly the whole system, and in particular the compulsory attendance laws, which preach that everyone must go perpetually to school — first to high school, now to college, and soon perhaps for a Ph.D. degree. It is the compulsion toward mass schooling that creates both the discontent and the ever-continuing shelter from the “real world.” In no other nation and in no other age has this mania for mass schooling so taken hold.

It is remarkable that the old libertarian right and the New Left, from very different perspectives and using very different rhetoric, came to a similar perception of the despotic nature of mass schooling. Thus, Albert Jay Nock, the great individualist theorist of the 1920s and ‘30s, denounced the educational system for forcing the “ineducable” masses into the schools out of a vain egalitarian belief in the equal educability of every child. Instead of allowing those children with the needed aptitude and ability to go to school, all children are being coerced into schools for their own supposed good, and the result is a distortion of the lives of those not suited for school and the wrecking of proper schooling for the truly educable. Nock also perceptively criticized the conservatives who attacked “progressive education” for diluting educational standards by giving courses in automobile driving, basket weaving, or choosing a dentist. Nock pointed out that if you force a whole host of children who cannot absorb classical education into school, then you have to shift education in the direction of vocational training, suitable [p. 122] for the lowest common denominator. The fatal flaw is not progressive education, but the drive toward universal schooling to which progressivism was a makeshift response.2

Such New Left critics as John McDermott and Paul Goodman charge, for their part, that the middle class has been forcing working class children, many of them with completely different values and aptitudes, into a public school system designed to force these children into a middle-class mould. It should be clear that whether one favors one class or the other, one ideal of schooling or another, the substance of the criticism is very much the same: that a whole mass of children are being dragooned into an institution for which they have little interest or aptitude.

Indeed, if we look into the history of the drive for public schooling and compulsory attendance in this and other countries, we find at the root not so much misguided altruism as a conscious scheme to coerce the mass of the population into a mould desired by the Establishment. Recalcitrant minorities were to be forced into a majority mould; all citizens were to be inculcated in the civic virtues, notably and always including obedience to the State apparatus. Indeed, if the mass of the populace is to be educated in government schools, how could these schools not become a mighty instrument for the inculcation of obedience to the State authorities? Martin Luther, a leader in the first modern drive for compulsory State education, phrased the plea typically in his famous letter of 1524 to the rulers of Germany:

Dear rulers . . . . I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school . . . . 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 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 . . . . 3

Thus, for Luther, the State schools were to be an indispensable part of the “war with the devil,” i.e., with Catholics, Jews, infidels, and competing Protestant sects. A modern admirer of Luther and of compulsory education was to remark that “the permanent and positive value of Luther’s pronouncement of 1524 lies . . . in the hallowed associations which it established for Protestant Germany between the national religion and the educational duties of the individual and the state. Thus, [p. 123] doubtless, was created that healthy public opinion which rendered the principle of compulsory school attendance easy of acceptance in Prussia at a much earlier date than in England.”4

The other great Protestant founder, John Calvin, was no less zealous in promoting mass public schooling, and for similar reasons. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest compulsory schooling in America was established by the Calvinist Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, those men who were so eager to plant an absolutist Calvinist theocracy in the New World. In June 1642, only a year after the Massachusetts Bay colony enacted its first set of laws, the colony established the first system of compulsory education in the English-speaking world. The law declared:

For as much as the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any commonwealth, and whereas many parents and masters are too indulgent and negligent of their duty of that kind, it is ordered that the selectmen of every town . . . shall have a vigilant eye over their neighbors, to see first that none of them shall suffer so much barbarism in any of their families, as not to endeavor to teach, by themselves or others, their children and apprentices . . . . 5

Five years later, Massachusetts Bay followed up this law with the establishment of public schools.

Thus, from the beginning of American history, the desire to mould, instruct, and render obedient the mass of the population was the major impetus behind the drive toward public schooling. 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. It is typical, for example, that in the course of their suppression of the Quakers, Massachusetts and Connecticut forbade that despised sect from establishing their own schools. And Connecticut, in a vain attempt to suppress the “New Light” movement, in 1742 forbade that sect from establishing any of their own schools. Otherwise, the Connecticut authorities reasoned, the New Lights “may tend to train youth in ill principles and practices, and introduce such disorders as may be of fatal consequences to the public peace and weal of this colony.”6  It is hardly a coincidence that the only truly free colony in New England — [p. 124] Rhode Island — was also the one colony in the area devoid of public schooling.

The motivation for public and compulsory schooling after Independence scarcely differed in essentials. Thus, Archibald D. Murphey, the father of the public school system in North Carolina, called for such schools as follows:

. . . all the children will be taught in them . . . . In these 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 can be trained to virtue.7

One of the most common uses of compulsory public schooling has been to oppress and cripple national ethnic and linguistic minorities or colonized peoples — to force them to abandon their own language and culture on behalf of the language and culture of the ruling groups. The English in Ireland and Quebec, and nations throughout Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia — all dragooned their national minorities into the public schools run by their masters. One of the most potent stimuli for discontent and rebellion by these oppressed peoples was the desire to rescue their language and heritage from the weapon of public schools wielded by their oppressors. Thus, the laissez-faire liberal Ludwig von Mises has written that, in linguistically mixed countries,

. . . 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.

Furthermore, Mises points out, the coercion inherent in rule by one nationality makes it impossible to solve the problem by formally allowing each parent to send his child to a school using a language of his own nationality.

It is often not possible for an individual — out of regard for his means of livelihood — to declare himself openly for one or another nationality. Under a system of interventionism, it could cost him the patronage of customers belonging to [p. 125] other nationalities or a job with an entrepreneur of a different nationality . . . . If one leaves to the parents the choice of the school to which they wish to send their children, then one exposes them to every conceivable form of political coercion. In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character so long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.8

In fact, 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, as educational reformer Samuel Lewis stated, into “one people.” It was the desire of the Anglo-Saxon majority to tame, channel, and restructure the immigrants, and in particular to smash the parochial school system of the Catholics, that formed the major impetus for educational “reform.” The New Left critics who perceive the role of the public schools of today in crippling and moulding the minds of ghetto children are only grasping the current embodiment of a long-cherished goal held by the public school Establishment — by the Horace Manns and the Henry Barnards and the Calvin Stowes. It was Mann and Barnard, for example, who urged the use of the schools for indoctrination against the “mobocracy” of the Jacksonian movement. And it was Stowe, author of an admiring tract on the Prussian compulsory school system originally inspired by Martin Luther, who wrote of the schools in unmistakably Lutheran and military terms:

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 . . . . 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 the spies of an invading army.9

Forty years later, Newton Bateman, a leading educator, spoke of the State’s “right of eminent domain” over the “minds and souls and bodies” [p. 126] of the nation’s children: Education, he asserted, “cannot be left to the caprices and contingencies of individuals . . . .”10

The most ambitious attempt by the public school partisans to maximize their control over the nation’s children came in Oregon during the early 1920s. The state of Oregon, unhappy even with allowing private schools certified by the state, passed a law on November 7, 1922, outlawing private schools and compelling all children to attend public school. Here was the culmination of the educationists’ dream. At last, all children were to be forced into the “democratizing” mould of uniform education by the state authorities. The law, happily, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June i, 1925). The Supreme Court declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the State,” and asserted that the Oregon law clashed with the “fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose.” The public school fanatics never tried to go that far again. But it is instructive to realize what the forces were that attempted to outlaw all competing private education in the state of Oregon. For the spearheads of the law were not, as we might expect, liberal or progressive educators or intellectuals; the spearhead was the Ku Klux Klan, then strong in the northern states, which was eager to crush the Catholic parochial school system, and to force all Catholic and immigrant children into the neo-Protestantizing and “Americanizing” force of the public school. The Klan, it is interesting to note, opined that such a law was necessary for the “preservation of free institutions.” It is well to ponder that the much-vaunted “progressive” and “democratic” public school system had its most ardent supporters in the most bigoted byways of American life, among people anxious to stamp out diversity and variety in America.11

• 1Thus, see Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and the Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Press, 1964), and numerous works by Goodman, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, Ivan Illich, and many others.
• 2Thus, see Albert Jay Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949); and Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper & Bros., 1943).
• 3See John William Perrin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England, 1896.
• 4A. E. Twentyman, “Education; Germany,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Ed. (1929), VII, 999-1000.
• 5See Perrin, op. cit.
• 6See Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935).
• 7The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey</em> (Raleigh, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1914), II, 53-54.
• 8Ludwig von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (Princeton, NJ: D Van Nostrand Co , 1962), pp 114-15
• 9Calvin E Stowe, The Prussian System of Public Instruction and its Applicability to the United States (Cincinnati, 1830), pp 61ff. On the elitist motivations of the educational reformers, see Michael B Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston Beacon Press, 1970).
• 10Quoted in Edward C. Kirkland, Dream and Thought in the Business Community, 1860-1900 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), p. 54.
• 11See Lloyd P. Jorgenson, “The Oregon School Law of 1922: Passage and Sequel,” Catholic Historical Review (October 1968), pp. 455-460.