School buildings, like this state-of-the-art school in Casper, Wyoming, lack intimacy and beauty

ALAN writes:

Like A. Wood, I was a school resister.  But I was much dumber than him.  I sat through nine years of it as an obedient little lamb.  And then I became a rebel.

In “Boys Hate School” [ Oct. 29, 2015 ], you wrote:  “The modern secular school is an impersonal factory.”

You are too generous.  I suggest that modern secular schools are child-crushing factories.

Schooling has nothing to do with learning.  It has to do with power, babysitting, and hatred of responsibility:  Power over parents and children throughout an artificially-prolonged childhood, and hatred of responsibility by parents who think their children should be somebody else’s responsibility.

It was in the mid-1960s that I came to hate schooling.

In the 1930s, my mother and uncle walked to their parochial school in south St. Louis.   But my uncle was not fond of school.  On some days he persuaded my mother to play hooky with him.  At age 14 he quit school and got a job within walking distance from their home.  It was possible to do that in those years, and it was work that he wanted to do.  Fortunately my grandparents had the supreme good sense not to call him a “dropout”, not to cajole him into going back to school, and not to call in “experts” or “professionals” to “help” him adjust himself to other people’s expectations of what he should be doing.  Instead, they had the profound wisdom to leave him alone.  They knew he was happy and was contributing to the family income.  There were no problems.  He got along just fine.

I knew none of this family history thirty years later, in 1966, when I began to dislike certain things in my second year of high school.  I was not “bored” by such things; I hated them.  I particularly despised certain classes that I was told I had no choice in attending.  Of course I did not realize then that I was being trained to become a docile citizen in what reporter William Lederer called “a nation of sheep”.  (Decades later, Lawrence Auster would call it “a nation of Eloi”.  Both men were dead on target.)

What was called “homework” was dished out in such exorbitant amounts that it would have required all my waking hours to complete with no time left over to read a book of my own choosing, attend a lecture, rake the leaves, or just relax and listen to music.  I hated such “homework” beyond the capacity of words to describe.  I loathed it so much that I could feel my stomach tighten each morning as I walked to school, knowing what lay ahead.  I did not know it then, but my contempt for such homework was shared and described perfectly two years earlier by a high school girl in Troy, New York.  Like me, she had not been sufficiently brain-anesthetized to accept every hour of her life being pre-empted by endless homework assignments.  She hated it.  So did I.  [ Letter to the Editor, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 29, 1964, p. 49 ]

It was in that setting in 1966 that I looked around desperately for some grown-up, any grown-up, to say to me, “You are neither mistaken nor evil nor irresponsible for hating the practice of coercion in the form of compulsory school attendance laws and compulsory attendance in certain classes.”  But I could not find such a grown-up.  No one in my family or extended family would be that voice for me.

I was not a “student rebel” or “activist”.  I was not a joiner or troublemaker.  I was not part of any in-group.  I went my own way.  I did not want to overthrow the school administration or burn the building down.  I was not a party animal and did not take part in whatever my fellow students were doing for “fun” in those years.  (At age 18, my idea of a good time was to spend an evening doing research in a library.  I did that many times in the late 1960s.)

What I wanted was much more radical:  I wanted the right to control my own mind; the right to study matters that held my interest (astronomy, philosophy, controversies on the borderlands of science); the right to say NO to classes in which I had Zero interest (chemistry, biology, physical education); and the right to make and defend those choices not because I thought I was an exceptional person but because I contended that that right is fundamental and absolute.

I did not want to start a revolution.  I was opposed not to education or to schools or to teachers and classrooms or to rules and standards.  I was opposed to the practice of coercion in the name of education (or anything else).

I thought it was contemptible for a thug to hold a gun to anyone’s head.  But I thought it was doubly contemptible for a do-gooder to hold that gun.

I did not want to hold a gun to anyone else’s head.  I wanted no one to hold a gun to mine.  I did not want to dictate what teachers taught.  I wanted the right and the responsibility to attend classes that I chose.

At that time, I had no understanding of what people like my mother and me were up against.  And she could not imagine how different high schools had become by 1966 from what they had been in the 1930s when she attended high school and when my uncle elected not to attend high school at all.

“What Johnny and his parents are up against,” wrote Isabel Paterson, the profoundly conservative critic of Nanny Government,“is a nation-wide vested interest of professionals who draw six years pay for teaching a child rather less than it could learn in about the equivalent of a year’s time in school.”  [ “Learning to Read: Child’s Play”, National Review, Nov. 30, 1957, p. 489 ]

She was writing about children learning to read, but her words apply equally well to the entire edifice of government-controlled schooling.  Worse than that:  Entire generations of Americans have been taught to absorb a worldview in which government-controlled schooling is claimed to be the best or only possible model of education.

In 1966, my dear mother had no idea what to make of my dissent.  It was the first substantive expression of dissent in my life; it would not be the last.  I was adamant in my refusal to take part in those classes in which I had no interest, and she was just as determined to cajole me to do precisely that.  It was a standoff.  A terrible conflict ensued.  It was the most unsettling episode in her life and mine.

Unwittingly, my mother inspired my lifelong distrust of “experts”, “professionals”, do-gooders, the schooling racket, and Nanny Government.  That, of course, was not what she intended.  It was her wish that I attend all classes and comply with whatever the school instructed me to do.  I must, she said, make better grades to get into a better college—to get a better job—to have a better life.  I got sick and tired of hearing that.  It was not that she was cruel or calculating; she could not have been that way if she tried.  It was simply that she made the mistake that countless parents make in imagining that they are going to plan substantial portions of their children’s lives.

That mistake was dramatized in a 1956 episode of the television series “Father Knows Best”.  Entitled “Betty Goes to College”, it was originally telecast on Sept. 26, 1956.  It concerned a conflict between a father and his high school-age daughter about which college she will attend.  It is expertly portrayed by actor Robert Young and actress Elinor Donahue and is well worth watching.  The conflict is resolved when the father realizes that his daughter cannot be made into a cookie-cutter copy of her parents and that her education cannot be force-fitted to a Procrustean model.

“Defiance of compulsory school attendance laws is virtually unheard of in this country,” wrote a Collier’s magazine reporter in 1953.  That was at a time when many American public schools still provided a solid education and inspired the loyalty of children and parents.  He was writing about a mother in Los Angeles who defied those laws when she chose to teach her seven children at home, a revolutionary act for which she earned repeated harassment by local schooling and child welfare bureaucrats.  They took her to court.  She and her husband were found guilty of lawbreaking, but they appealed the decision to another court and it was reversed.  They did not dislike public schools.  But they were well-educated parents who were earnestly devoted to teaching their children at home and preserving family integrity.  [ Robert C. Goodman, “A Mother Rebels: ‘I Won’t Send my Children to Public School’”, Collier’s magazine, Nov. 13, 1953, p. 62 ]

Twenty years later, Amish parents in Wisconsin earned harassment by government busybodies when they refused to send their children to high school.  They were tried and convicted.  The conviction was later overturned by a higher court.  [ Stephen Arons, “Compulsory Education: The Plain People Resist”, Saturday Review, Jan. 15, 1972, p. 52 ]

In 1985 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a front-page story about a family in Missouri who were teaching their daughters at home and were being harassed by state officials accusing them of neglect.  In a letter of dissent, I wrote:

“The real crime of parents who teach their own children is not negligence but the refusal to authorize the paralysis of their children’s minds by state workers.” 

The evil of compulsory school attendance laws was seldom remarked or opposed by any “conservative” commentators, but James J. Kilpatrick was an exception:

“My own guess, from some years of contemplating public education,” he wrote in 1975, “is that one of the root causes [ of vandalism to public school buildings by “students” ] is the universal requirement of compulsory school attendance.  If compulsory school laws were repealed…the schools would be relieved of many uneducable louts…..  Then if child labor laws were revised so those louts could be put to honest work, as in Europe, still more good might be accomplished…..”     [ James J. Kilpatrick, “Violence, Vandalism in Public Schools”, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 21, 1975 ]

His proposals were reasonable and workable.  That is why they were not adopted and will never be adopted–because government control of schools is about power, not about education.

Rose Wilder Lane was a prolific writer who wrote passionately in defense of ordinary people’s common sense, the American way of life, and severely limited government.  (See her The Discovery of Freedom, 1943.)  She hated school and was largely self-taught through her voracious reading.

There was a boy who grew up in the 1870s in the coal and clay mining region of south St. Louis that I wrote about in a previous essay [Communities in Memory Alone, The Thinking Housewife, August 5, 2015 ].  His father was part-owner of a mining company there.  He wanted his son to grow up and follow him in that line of work.  But his son had other ideas.  Little Charlie Russell did not like school.  In fact, he hated it.  One time he managed to play hooky for seven weeks.  His father tried cajolery, bribes, coercion, and punishment—but none of that would induce Charlie to go to school and study his lessons.  His father was adamant, but Charlie was more adamant.

If he had lived a hundred years later, he might have been forcibly drugged with Ritalin after “experts” announced that he was afflicted with an impressive-sounding disease called “hyperactivity” or “minimal brain dysfunction” or “attention deficit disorder” or “bipolar disorder”.  But fortunately for him, he lived long before the invention of psychiatric Fairy Tales like those.  He left St. Louis, travelled west, and spent his life painting beautiful scenes of cowboys, Indians, and the Old West.   Would he have done that if he had succumbed to the compulsion of schooling?

 “Unable to work from books, his very heart and soul were being crushed and hardened by the rules of school into which he was unable to fit himself.”   [ Ramon F. Adams and Homer E. Britzman, Charles M. Russell:  The Cowboy Artist, Trail’s End Publishing Co., 1948, p. 13 ]

The problem of American schools is not educational, financial, or technological.  It is moral and philosophical.  But it is typical of modern Americans to misidentify moral problems as technical problems and then seek technical solutions.  No greater folly is imaginable.

Good intentions will not fix American schools.  Good premises are required to do that, but Americans will not abandon their faulty premises anytime soon.

The problem of American schools is the principle of compulsion upon which they are built.  Teachers are not the problem, not even incompetent teachers, so long as they are constrained to offer their services in an open marketplace.  But American schools do not exist in an open marketplace.  They are propped up by a vast network of interlocking rackets:  Teachers’ unions, textbook publishers, transit companies, the medical and pharmaceutical rackets, and Nanny Government, the biggest racket of all.

Respect for children is the last thing you will find among such racketeers.  That is one crucial difference between government-run schools and the Montessori schools, the Waldorf schools, home-schooling families, and critics of American education ranging from Albert Jay Nock and Ayn Rand to John Holt and Paul Goodman to Richard Mitchell and John Taylor Gatto.  Though there were differences of opinion between and among them, all of them had one bedrock principle in common:  Respect for the child, and the understanding that a child is not a little container but a sentient being who must be allowed to grow at its own pace and in its own manner and without being force-fitted to a Procrustean format for learning.

Never have so many people expended so much energy, expense, rhetoric, and ostentation on what they call “education” and then produced so many “students” who understand so little.

“My students are know-nothings,” Professor Patrick Deneen reports about children who live in a nation that is the most technologically advanced in history and where the wisdom of the ages is available more widely and more easily than ever.  [“Res Idiotica”, Feb. 23, 2016, here]

That is true but should come as no particular surprise to people who understand what the schooling racket is about.

Professor Deneen writes:

 “Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement.  Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings.  The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school.  It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. …..”

I agree, except I would suggest it is a consequence of the surrender by American white men, over a span of years, of their proper patriarchal authority and the responsibility to enforce rules and standards.

My spirit was not crushed in 1966 only because I was too stubborn to permit it.  Instead, my spirit was inflamed—with anger, resentment, and the conviction that other possibilities existed.  (They did and they do.)  But I was an exception (and have been a misfit in modern culture ever since).  Most children yield to the demands of the child-crushing factories because they see their parents yield, and most parents yield because they are advised to do so by “experts” (in racketeering).

Fake diseases like “minimal brain dysfunction”, “attention deficit disorder”, and “bipolar disorder” are cranked out periodically by the medical racket and pharmaceutical racket for the same reason that automobile manufacturers introduce new models every year:  To keep the dollars coming in.  Besides that, many parents love being told that their children are afflicted with this or that impressive-sounding disease: Backed by the apparent authority of self-serving doctors, it enables them to disclaim responsibility for their spoiled brats.

(I deny the existence of all the “diseases” named above.  I also deny the existence of “learning disabilities”.  Professional do-gooders uncovered a gold mine for themselves when they invented all those fake diseases and sold them to a nation of gullible customers.  I contend that all such terms are Big Lies.  They are not medical descriptions of anything; they are moral judgments disguised as medical description.

(This is just one example of how Americans are permitting the vocabulary of “science” to displace the vocabulary of ethics.  The purpose of such lies is to insure and increase the power, money, and influence of those who run the medical, pharmaceutical, and schooling rackets.  Such lies and fallacies are extremely popular because they enable people to evade the hard responsibility of making moral judgments and enforcing them.  How much easier it is to turn that responsibility over to doctors or other “experts” who claim that they are neutral scientists instead of partisans in moral conflicts.  These matters are discussed at great length in the life work of Dr. Thomas Szasz.)

American schools cannot be fixed because a morally bankrupt culture will have morally bankrupt schools.  It is the premise of government power over parents, teachers, and children that should be opposed and consigned to the dust bin of Bad Ideas:  The collectivist premise that government owns their children.  The proper solution is to take that power away from government and return it to parents and local communities.  That could be done over a span of 5-10 years, but only if Americans had the will to do it.  Quite obviously they do not now have that will, because they are too soft, too decadent, and too unimaginative to conceive ways of living and teaching their children without dependence on Nanny Government.

The only practical solution for conscientious parents and teachers is to secede from the decadence of American public schools and the larger culture that surrounds them.  Learn to say NO to do-gooders, especially to Nanny Government.  No one offers a better model for such resistance than the Amish.  The best advice ever given by Laura Wood was when she wrote:  “Live as if on an Island; Remove Your Children from School”.  [ The Thinking Housewife, Nov. 6, 2010 ]       

 My uncle worked all his life in the line of work he chose for himself at age 14, was a veteran of World War II, never took or wanted a dime of charity, and lived a happy, productive life in a small town in Missouri with his family and extended family.  He knew that the claim that more schooling could have made life better for him was nonsense.

Americans today cannot imagine such a thing.  On the contrary:  They build bright, shiny new buildings for their child-crushing factories and fill them with colorful gadgets and doodads, repeating the Fairy Tale that such things will “improve learning”.  Historians of the future (if any) will marvel at the credulity of such people.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Yes, indeed. Hard to disagree with it. My main objection to compulsory school, in addition to Alan’s, is that the school system takes over the family’s, and society’s, life.

The school, i.e., the Dept of Education, is running the show. A child or teenager may be greatly talented and want to spend time training for something or other, or travel with the family, even work at a job utilizing those talents, or partake of international competitions. Or just help run the family farm or business.

But wait! Their schooling will suffer! After much kerfuffle and conflict with Authorities, the parents agree to bring along an entire curriculum of books and instructions and make sure little Brittany doesn’t miss a single day of math, “history” and general B.S.

Everything in our culture as a whole seems to revolve around the school year and its needs and demands. It’s not only the children who are being slotted and controlled by these schedules.

Laura writes:

Parents should be able to take their children out of school at any time, for any reason.

The whole idea of having to offer proof that a child is sick when he is not in school is a power trip over parents, who should not have to offer any proof at all.

Eric writes:

There are a few other issues that immediately come to mind with modern government schools:

1. They are horribly inefficient, and this breeds inefficient habits in the students. A school day for my high-school student son could be condensed into an hour or hour and a half of semi-efficiently used time. The time spent on administrative matters, moving students from place to place, dealing with behavioral problems, and waiting for the lowest common denominator in the class to catch on to a concept slow things down tremendously.

2. They are the social situation where your Christian daughter learns degenerate habits by watching those around her.

3. They are the social situation where your children are indoctrinated into miscegenation and other sins.

I could go on, but in the interest of efficiency, I shall not!

Laura writes:

They are horribly inefficient, it’s true.

I don’t call miscegenation a “sin,” by the way. It’s unnatural. God likes our true diversity. But it is not sinful in itself nor is it sinful for a culture to discourage it. In general, I think there is a strong case for some segregated schools — not mandatory or required and not in higher learning or vocational schools, but optional — because of different cultures and learning styles.

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