Neither you nor your parents can be too careful to see that your young and fruitful minds are fed and stored with good principles. You want to learn that which is true — when you learn anything about God, Jesus Christ, the angels, the Holy Ghost, the gospel, the way to be saved, your duty to your parents, brethren, sisters or to any of your fellow men, or any history, art or science, I say when you learn those things, you want to learn that which is true, so when you get those things riveted in your mind and planted in your heart, and you trust to it in future life and lean upon it for support, that it may not fail you like a broken reed.

Source: President Wilford Woodruff
Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, p. 266.

Topics: Uncategorized

It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.

Source: Albert Shanker
President, American Federation of Teachers

Topics: Education

Within a decade [of the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957] local control of school districts was transferred, primarily because of changes in funding, to state and federal agencies. Sputnik had, in effect, transformed American education into a centralized system in which organizational men and women—administrators and bureaucrats—rather than teachers and students, became the key players in a very big, very expensive game. It is a legacy which haunts and poisons the classroom a generation later . . . . With the increased power accorded the education bureaucrats following passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the mid-sixties, curriculum, content, and, perhaps most importantly, the teacher’s authority and autonomy in the classroom underwent significant transformations. It was becoming increasingly difficult to be a teacher in an era in which uniformity, compliance, and administrative control were in ascendance. And if it was becoming increasingly difficult to be a good teacher, it was clearly more difficult to obtain a first-rate education in the typical American school.

Source: David and Micki Colfax
Homeschooling for Excellence

Topics: Uncategorized

Community compulsory service patently violates the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude.

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State

Topics: Uncategorized

Imagine that you are one of those functionaries of government in whom there has grown, it seems inescapable, the propensity to command, in however oblique a fashion and for whatever supposedly good purpose, the liberty and property of your constituents. Which would you prefer, educated constituents or ignorant ones? . . . Which would you rather face, even considering your own convictions that the cause in which you want to command liberty and property is just—citizens with or without the power of informed discretion? Citizens having that power will require of you a laborious and detailed justification of your intentions and expectations and may, even having that, adduce other information and exercise further discretion to the contrary of your propensities. On the other hand, the ill-informed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded by the recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to self-interest, however spurious. It is only informed discretion that can detect such maneuvers.

Source: Richard Mitchell
The Graves of Academe, pp. 7-8.

Topics: Uncategorized

Some children are dull and demand a slower learning pace; bright children require a rapid pace to develop their faculties. Furthermore, many children are apt in one subject and quite inept in another. They should be permitted to develop themselves in their best subjects and drop the poor ones. Whatever educational standards are imposed from outside, injustice is done to all—to the less able who cannot absorb any instruction, to those with different sets of aptitudes in different subjects, to the bright children whose minds would like to be off and winging in more advanced courses. Similarly, whatever pace the teacher sets in class is bound to be injurious to almost all—to the dull who cannot keep up and to the bright who lose interest. Moreover, those in the middle, the “average,” are not always the same in all classes and often are not the same from day-to-day in one class.

Source: Murray N. Rothbard
Education, Free and Compulsory: The Individual’s Education, p. 7.

Topics: Uncategorized

Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.

Source: Benjamin Rush
signer of the Declaration of Independence

Topics: Uncategorized

In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded rapidly. Their schools were commercial ventures, and, consequently, competition was keen . . . . Popular demands, and the element of competition, forced them not only to add new courses of instruction, but constantly to improve their methods and technique of instruction.

Source: Robert F. Seybolt
Source Studies in American Colonial Education: The Private School, p. 102.

Topics: Uncategorized

According to Carl F. Kaestle, “Literacy was quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The best generalization possible is that New York, like other American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did not depend primarily upon the schools.” Another indication of the high rate of literacy is book sales. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting the 20 percent who were slaves)-the equivalent of 10 million copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of under 20 million, Noah Webster’s Spelling Book sold over 5 million copies. Walter Scott’s novels sold that many copies between 1813 and 1823, which would be the equivalent of selling 60 million copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper sold millions of copies. John Taylor Gatto notes that Scott’s and Cooper’s books were not easy reading. European visitors to early nineteenth-century America such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de Nemours—marveled at how well educated the people were.

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p38-39

Topics: Uncategorized

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