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

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. If this principle really is not understood, let any parent holding a positive religious faith consider how it would seem to him if his children were taken by force and taught an opposite creed.

Source: Isabel Paterson
The God of the Machine, published in 1943

Topics: Uncategorized

Only when all parents, not just rich ones, have a truly free choice in education, when they can take their children out of a school they don’t like, and have a choice of many others to send them to, or the possibility of starting their own, or of educating their children outside of school altogether—only then will we teachers begin to stop being what most of us still are and if we are honest know we are, which is jailers and baby-sitters, cops without uniforms, and begin to be professionals, freely exercising an important valued, and honored skill and art.

Source: John Holt
What Do I Do Monday? (New York: Dutton, 1970), p. 265.

Topics: Education

The schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with its appropriate morsel and shock. And when this method doesn’t work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children—something they must diagnose and treat. All these assumptions are wrong.

Source: John Holt
Learning All the Time: How Small Children Begin to Read, Write,
Count, and Investigate the World Without Being Taught, pp. 151-52.

Topics: Education

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