In his pep talk to the nation’s children today, President Obama forgot to mention that many of the greatest Americans never went to school or hardly went at all. It’s a fact that contradicts much of what he said. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison had very little formal schooling. Most prominent early Americans who did attend schools, men such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, attended small institutions that have nothing in common physically or culturally with today’s large factory schools. 

Obama displayed the sort of earnest, well-meaning belief in school that is held by the majority of Americans. The nation’s public school system has two redeeming features: it employs hundreds of thousands of decent and hard-working adults, and it provides childcare. It is a jobs program and a babysitting service. As an institution devoted to learning and to individual development, mass government schooling fails. It is an enemy to liberty, to the family, to individual happiness and to the American way. People succeed in spite of school not because of it.

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