Children of the Sea, Jozef Israëls; 1872

ALAN writes:

In “The Baby Philosopher,” you wrote:

                “The baby is not capable of conceptual thinking. But still he acquires an important philosophical premise early on through all this investigation. He is mostly a scientist, but he starts to become a philosopher too….”

Entirely correct. Few people understand that what is often dismissed as “just playing” is not always play and is never “just” anything, but rather the most earnest endeavor by an infant to make sense of what he sees, hears, and feels.  No endeavor in life could be more earnest or less corrupt.

But your essay also struck a chord in my memory because of that phrase about “the baby is mostly a scientist…” In a letter printed by a St. Louis newspaper in 1971, I wrote:

       The claim that very few children would acquire any more than a very superficial grasp of science if artificial motivations were not used is a ludicrous conjecture. Actually, all evidence indicates the opposite.  Indeed, every baby is a scientist and remains such until the schools have mutilated his natural love of learning by turning it from an active into a passive process. 

The occasion for my remarks was a clash of opinions with a philosophy instructor about Charles Silberman’s book Crisis in the Classroom (1970).  The instructor contended that Silberman’s critical assessment of mindlessness in American public schools was unfounded.  He also made the common mistake of confusing schooling with learning.

I contended that Silberman’s assessment was valid and that schools are not about learning but about training for docility.  I argued that the most important things children learn, they do not learn in school or because of school.

Silberman’s work was funded by a private company.  The philosophy instructor was employed by a tax-supported “community college.” People who feed at the public trough are not likely to welcome suggestions that what they do can be done better and at less cost by private schools, companies, or families.

In 1971, I was quite young and my views on the matter of education vs. schooling were not fully formed.  Nor was I exempt from being influenced by a few writers who leaned Leftward but also echoed my sentiments against compulsory school attendance laws.  Some of what I wrote then was poorly expressed or just plain wrong.  But I stand by the essence of the paragraph quoted above.

In June 1970, I paid 75 cents for a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, whose cover story was “Murder in the Schoolroom:  How the public schools kill dreams and mutilate minds.” It was an excerpt from Silberman’s book.

That was not news to me, because I had seen such mindlessness during my high school years.  How schools mutilate children’s minds is too gruesome to describe here; the gory details can be read in Silberman’s book, in the chapter on “progressive education” in Ayn Rand’s The New Left (1971), and in the books of Richard Mitchell and John Taylor Gatto.  [Such mutilation is entirely apart from—and precedes—indoctrination in Leftist ideology.]

Rearing a child is a sacred responsibility.  It was understood better and by more Americans in the years before the Age of Gadgets.  It is seldom understood by parents today, who imagine that they are doing wonderful things with such gadgets for their children (because that is what they are told by the companies that manufacture those gadgets), when they are actually doing things to their children that reduce or nullify an infant’s capacity to learn.

All babies know how to be babies, but not all parents know how to be parents. That and how an infant moves from perception to concept-formation to conceptual thinking is one of the wonders of life.  That it is comprehended so poorly or not at all by millions of people who think they are “educated” or dismissed by such people as insignificant is proof of moral-philosophical bankruptcy.

What astonished me in those years long ago was not that men like Silberman were appalled by the mindlessness in American schools but that most parents and teachers were not.

It must rank as one of the greatest ironies in modern American history that what Silberman used in 1970 as a metaphor (“murder in the schoolroom”) became a literal reality just a few decades later.  The more the schools failed and the worse they got, the more money and power Americans agreed to fork over to them, the spineless “Conservatives” as well as the “Liberals”, the Republicans as well as the Democrats.  That is more proof of moral-philosophical bankruptcy.

None of this would have surprised a man like Zachary Montgomery, who wrote and spoke in the 1880s about the evil of what he described (properly) as the anti-parental, communistic school system.  He argued that government power over schools was inimical to the family, the foundation of society, and that such power was a usurpation of parental authority.  He favored a laissez-faire free market model in which parents—not government and not any group of do-gooders—choose a school of their liking or no school at all if they wish to teach their children at home.

He wrote:

      “…there is no kind or degree of communism so utterly revolting as that which, for educational purposes, virtually asserts a community of title, not only to the property, but also to the children of the private citizen.  [As in: “It Takes a Village.”]  Yet this…is the communism of America; a communism having for its main trunk an educational system the most ruinously expensive and the most demoralizing that the world ever saw.  A communism whose poisonous roots have spread far and wide, and struck deep down into the soil of American literature, American politics, and American religion….”

    — Zachary Montgomery, Poison Drops in the Federal Senate: The School Question from a Parental and Non-Sectarian Standpoint, Washington: Gibson Brothers, 1886, p. 133.

Note especially that part about “ruinously expensive and demoralizing.” Then try to imagine what Mr. Montgomery would say if he were here now and could witness the extravagant waste of money, theft, stupidity, excuses, incompetence, trendiness, profanity, fights, vandalism by students, cheating by students and teachers, moral rot, government-forced mixing of children who want nothing to do with each other or hate each other, affirmative action nincompoops, contempt for rules, contempt for children, contempt for parents, and contempt for accountability that are the essence of American public schools today.

It is standard procedure for opponents of government power over schools—men like Montgomery and Albert Jay Nock and women like Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane—to be ignored, maligned, or demonized.  Most of your readers have probably never read them or even heard of them.

Now 1971 seems such a long time ago.  I was young and naïve enough then to imagine that someday Americans would get wise and disestablish government power over schools.  Isn’t that hilarious?  There was little enough reason in 1971 to imagine such a thing; there is none whatever today.

People who accept and agree to fund an anti-parental, communistic system of schools richly deserve the consequences.  My sympathy for such people ran out long, long ago.

And the wisdom in an essay like “The Baby Philosopher” will never be understood by more than a tiny percentage of Americans.

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