by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
Parents are rightly concerned about what is happening in our “public” schools. Crazed “educators” are encouraging impressionable children to “transition” to another sex, as if such a thing was possible. Students are taught that sexual promiscuity is a good thing. They are brainwashed to accept socialist attacks on our free enterprise system.
What can we do about this disaster? The Trump Administration and anti-woke Governors like Ron deSantis have tried to solve the problem by issuing directives to the schools to eliminate the noxious programs and give parents more say-so about what their children are taught. But teachers who have been indoctrinating our children are well-entrenched, and it will be extremely difficult to curb their baleful influence.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
No matter how much good these efforts accomplish, they fail to deal with the real problem, and that is the existence of “public” education itself. Schools run by the state are inherently institutions that propagandize what the state wants schoolchildren to learn. As the great Murray Rothbard explains: “The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully developed he cannot act completely for himself as a responsible individual. He must be under tutelage. This tutelage is a complex and difficult task. From an infancy of complete dependence and subjection to adults, the child must grow up gradually to the status of an independent adult. The question is under whose guidance, and virtual ‘ownership’ the child should be: his parents’ or the State’s? There is no third, or middle, ground in this issue. Some party must control, and no one suggests that some individual third party have authority to seize the child and rear it.”
For Rothbard the choice between these options is a “no-brainer.” “It is obvious that the natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. The parents are the literal producers of the child, and the child is in the most intimate relationship to them that any people can be to one another. The parents have ties of family affection to the child. The parents are interested in the child as an individual and are the most likely to be interested and familiar with his requirements and personality. Finally, if one believes at all in a free society, where each one owns himself and his own products, it is obvious that his own child, one of his most precious products, also comes under his charge.” Rothbard’s point is a clear application of the basic principles of libertarianism.
If the state takes over schooling, this is a clear violation of the parents’ rights. “The only logical alternative to parental ‘ownership’ of the child is for the State to seize the infant from the parents and to rear it completely itself. To any believer in freedom this must seem a monstrous step indeed. The rights of the parents are completely violated, their own loving product seized from them to be subjected to the will of strangers.”
But there is, if anything, an even more fundamental issue at stake. Children need freedom in order to develop their powers to live their lives, but the State is inherently a violent institution that suppresses individuality. “The rights of the child are violated, for he grows up in subjection to the unloving hands of the State, with little regard for his individual personality. For each person to be ‘educated,’ to develop his faculties to the fullest, he needs freedom for this development. But the State! The State’s very being rests on violence, on compulsion. As a matter of fact, the very feature that distinguishes the State from other individuals and groups is that the State has the only (legal) power to use violence. In contrast to all other individuals and organizations, the State issues decrees which must be obeyed at the risk of suffering prison or the electric chair. The child would have to grow up under the wings of an institution resting on violence and restriction. What sort of peaceful development could take place under such auspices?”
What will the State teach? You might think that this would depend on the kind of state it is, and to some extent this is true. Schools under Trump will differ from those under brain-dead Joe Biden. But there is nevertheless an underlying pressure that leads the State to impose uniformity and to teach obedience to the government. “Furthermore, it is inevitable that the State would impose uniformity on the teaching of charges. Not only is uniformity more congenial to the bureaucratic temper and easier to enforce; this would be almost inevitable where collectivism has supplanted individualism. With collective State ownership of the children replacing individual ownership and rights, it is clear that the collective principle would be enforced in teaching as well. Above all, what would be taught is the doctrine of obedience to the State itself. For tyranny is not really congenial to the spirit of man, who requires freedom for his full development Therefore, techniques of inculcating reverence for despotism and other types of ‘thought control’ are bound to emerge. Instead of spontaneity, diversity, and independent men, there would emerge a race of passive, sheep-like followers of the State. Since they would be only incompletely developed, they would be only half-alive. This is the logical goal of the Statists in education. The issue which has been joined in the past and in the present is: shall there be a free society with parental control, or a despotism with State control? We shall see the logical development of the idea of State encroachment and control.”
