I have said for a long time now in these spaces that the worst thing we ever did as a country, a culture, a people, was to turn the education of our young over to the government
Over at Substack, C. Bradley Thompson breaks this one down:
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
To achieve these goals, the single most important task of the new government schooling was to disconnect the natural ties between children and their parents.
No longer would parents determine in what, how, and by whom their children were to be taught. These functions would now be taken over by the government. Thus, the first steps in liberating children from the baneful influence of their parents could only be achieved by legislating compulsory attendance laws and mandating a common curriculum where all students would learn the same political ideology. . . .
Horace Mann, the 19th-century godfather of American government schooling, summed up the anti-parent premise of state-run education in these terms: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
And therein lies the point. Ask yourself, does anyone really believe that a government-run educational system is going to properly teach our young about the founders vision of limited government?
