A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia’s ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans’ was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences.

Source: John Taylor Gatto
“Our Prussian School System,” p. 10

Topics: America, History; Education

One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year . . . . It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry—especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.

Source: Albert Einstein
(a “product” of the prussian school system)
Quoted in Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation and The Community of Scholars

Topics: Education

Historians have offered conflicting interpretations of the common-school and compulsory-education movement. Some see it intended as a cure for poverty, crime, and class tensions; others see it as a pro-democracy movement; others believe it was an upper-class movement motivated by a fear of instability in the working class; another group of writers sees it as a vast mill to serve the industrial system; and still others see it as a mechanism for imposing an American Protestant ideology. Barry Poulson points out that labor unions supported compulsory attendance laws because they kept children out of the workforce and reduced competition. It is likely that all these intentions were at work in the movement. The key point is that each shared the view that the coercive apparatus of government should be used to override the preferences of free citizens and to interfere with the spontaneous growth of society; in other words, all were contrary to the liberalism on which the United States was founded. To the extent that the common-school founders saw the system as essential for the moral education of children, they were operating on an anti-family premise. Parents could not be trusted to raise children of high character. Once again, the government was thought to know better than parents in matters of morality, an area of life well within the grasp of common people. In an essential respect, then, the common school took children from their parents. As Horace Mann put it, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p. 47-48

Topics: Education

A leading disciple of [Herbert] Spencer’s, Auberon Herbert, found another form of dependence fostered by the public schools in his 1880 essay “State Education: A Help or Hindrance?” Herbert stated as a maxim that “no man or class accepts the position of receiving favors without learning, in the end, that these favors become disadvantages.” He then asserted that state education is a political favor: “Whenever one set of people pay for what they do not use themselves, but what is used by another set of people, their payment is and must be of the nature of a favor, and does and must create a sort of dependence,” namely, the dependence of working people on the upper classes, whose members run the school systems. “The most striking result [of public education] is that the wealthier class think that it is their right and their duty to direct the education of the people. They deserve no blame. As long as they pay by rate and tax for a part of this education, they undoubtedly possess a corresponding right of direction.” So “the workman is selling his birthright for the mess of pottage. Because he accepts the rate and tax paid by others, he must accept the intrusion of these others into his own home affairs—the management and education of his children.”

The remedy for that dependence, Herbert wrote, was for the working class to renounce the school system, “reject all forced contributions from others, and do their own work through their own voluntary combinations.” He expected that “the most healthy state of education will exist when the workmen, dividing themselves into natural groups according to their own tastes and feelings, organize the education of their children without help, or need of help, from outside.”

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p64-65.

Topics: Education

We want to save our children, and to have them partake of all the blessings that encircle the sanctified — to have them receive the blessings of their parents who have been faithful to the fullness of the gospel. We do not want them to wade through all the routine of false doctrines and erroneous systems that we have had to wade through in our generation.

Source: Wilford Woodruff
Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, p.268

Topics: Uncategorized

In one sense I am [an advocate of bad schools]. I maintain that we have as much right to have wretched schools as to have wretched newspapers, wretched preachers, wretched books, wretched institutions, wretched political economists, wretched Members of Parliament, and wretched Ministers. You cannot proscribe all these things without proscribing Liberty. The man is a simpleton who says, that to advocate Liberty is to advocate badness. The man is a quack and doctrinaire of the worst German breed, who would attempt to force all minds, whether individual or national, into a mould of ideal perfection, to stretch it out or to lop it down to his own Procrustean standard, I maintain that Liberty is the chief cause of excellence; but it would cease to be Liberty if you proscribed everything inferior. Cultivate giants if you please; but do not stifle dwarfs.

Source: Edward Baines

Topics: Uncategorized

How to teach, how to improve children, are questions admitting of new and advanced solutions, no less than inquiries how best to cultivate the soil, or to perfect manufactures. And these improvements cannot fail to proceed indefinitely, so long as education is kept wide open, and free to competition, and to all those impulses which liberty constantly supplies. But once close up this great science and movement of mind from these invigorating breezes, whether by monopoly or bounty, whether by coercion or patronage, and the sure result will be torpor and stagnancy.

Source: Algernon Wells

Topics: Education

[The popular] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. And so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread the enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Source: H. L. Mencken

Topics: Education

There is a general feeling that something is wrong with the public schools. The tendency is to blame the schoolma’ams. They seem to be responsible for the fact that the children learn very little and are generally bewildered. But the truth is that the schoolma’am herself is the victim. The real villains are the quacks who now run the American school system . . . and they ruin her as a teacher. Every year she is beset by a series of new arcana and forced to struggle with them on penalty of losing her job . . . . As a result teaching becomes a madness and the children learn next to nothing.

Source: H. L. Mencken, 1934

Topics: Education

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