Supporters of the state often point to the idea that the “state is the oldest institution in human history” as a defense of the state’s existence. This is an insanely false claim debunked expertly by the Institute’s own Ryan McMaken at this year’s Mises University. The actual oldest institution in human history is the family unit. Even Neanderthals, the biological evolutionary predecessors to Humans, who lacked the complex civilization of us homo sapiens, had family units that were critical to their survival as a species. Even other apes that exist today, such as chimpanzees, have family units comparable to our own.
The family is an important part of the survival of humans and even remains a crucial part of human survival today. From the day we are born our parents, whether biological or adopted, are our caretakers and the primary influencers of our moral principles and outlook on life. This is the role they take on and their service to children as the main authority for guidance, punishment, and catalyst for success.
At least this is how it is meant to be in the natural world. With the advent of the modern state, the natural order has been upset by the appropriation of the purpose of parents. Thanks to the state’s alliance with the intellectual and academic class, as described by Murray Rothbard in Anatomy of the State, this is made possible as “intellectual” arguments are made for the state and taught to the public.
This alliance’s effects are seen through the public education system’s widespread and encroaching takeover of the narrative in the battle for the minds of our children through their pro-state narratives on history, economics, and politics. Our children are increasingly raised and taught by those outside the family unit. Kids, on average, start primary school as early as 6, but with the popularity of pre-School, the introduction of the state’s narrative is starting as early as 3 years old.
Children have begun spending more and more time in government schools than at home, interacting with their parents less and less. This has caused teachers and school staff, not parents, to become the ones instilling values and beliefs in children. Do you think any of those would be towards questioning or even opposing the state?
This trend is not only troublesome towards combating the state but the actual success of our children. Even academic literature admits that parents play a crucial role as children’s primary educators and catalysts for success. It is no wonder that our educational output has been getting worse as the state has grown as a part of children’s lives.
Yet state-funded education continues to move further and further towards policies that cut parents out of the picture. Contrary to Public Education advocates narrative, Education spending by the federal, state, and local governments has been increasing according to the numbers they provide on the issue. As previously established despite the constant increases in spending educational output still has been getting worse. This is exactly because the expansion of the Education system is not actually about facilitating success for students but further subverting the role of the family and further implanting the idea that the state is necessary and good in the minds of the public.
The greatest evidence for such lies in the emphasis placed on secondary education. More people than ever are attending college now, with attendance rates increasing every year despite continual price increases. Many educators will push this as the “only option” or the “only good option,” even integrating it into the curriculum through Senior college essays and other programs. The reality is that they are wrong about it being “the only option” as several others exist, such as trade jobs that can often yield higher incomes than jobs out of a college degree.
The system itself can be supplanted by putting students directly into the jobs of the desired career as Economist Bryan Caplan explains in his book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money. He establishes that the main purpose of all schooling, especially Secondary Education, is to prepare individuals to be good employees by creating a signaling device, a degree, that says that person shows up, does what they are told, and shows some level of competence. What Caplan points out though is that jobs themselves are signaling devices that show this and are more efficient by actually creating goods and services and giving career-specific knowledge rather than generalities and theoretical ideas.
This inefficiency is not one of incompetency, but a purposeful one that directs the public away from private institutions, such as the family, to state institutions to do as Rothbard described “make the arguments for the state’s existence”. This is something that could not be accomplished if the family was not subverted from early on by funneling children into what can only be described as an “educational prison” that the intellectual and academic class use to disseminate pro-state arguments that make them valuable to the state.
This is the reality of the bloated education system which encourages dependence on the state. Something it has had immense success in as expansions of government authority has become increasingly popular among younger people in the form of socialism or progressivism. A purposeful tactic that is no better seen than a perfect representative of the state and Intellectual class’s relationship in Karl Marx who wrote on the need to “abolish the family” and how the state “did the job for them.” and is doing as we speak.
