 | | The Daily Reckoning | Saturday, March 24, 2012 |
- Jeffrey Tucker on the sorry state of state "education,"
- Readers weigh in with their own views on the subject,
- Plus, all the past week's reckonings, archived for your own, free market edification...
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|  | | | | | | Joel Bowman, checking in today from Rancho Santana, Nicaragua... | |  | | Joel Bowman | Few columns published recently in these pages have generated the kind of interest currently circling Jeffrey Tucker's latest musing. We include it, and a selection of reader responses, below in today's weekend edition of the Daily Reckoning. Please enjoy...
[Today's feature column first appeared in these pages on March 20, 2012]
| | | | | The Daily Reckoning Presents | | Is School Like Jail? | | |  | | Jeffrey Tucker | The people in my community love their public schools. So too it is in most of the country. If only they knew the costs, and I don't mean just the financial costs, which are two and three times those of private schools. I also mean the opportunity costs: If only people knew what they were missing! Imagine education wholly managed by the market economy. The variety! The choice! The innovation! All the features we've come to expect in so many areas of life -- groceries, software, clothing, music -- would also pertain to education. But as it is, the market for education is hobbled, truncated, frozen and regimented, and tragically, we've all gotten used to it. The longer people live with educational socialism, the more they adapt to its inefficiencies, deprivations and even indignities. So it is with American public schools. Many people love them, but it's like the "Stockholm Syndrome": We've come to have a special appreciation for our captors and masters because we see no way out. There is a way out. But first we have to see the problem for what it is. I know of no better means than exploring an absolutely prophetic book first published in 1974, edited by William Rickenbacker. It is called The Twelve-Year Sentence. This is not only one of the great titles in the history of publishing; it is a rare book that dared to say what no one wanted to hear. True, the essays are all scholarly and precise (the book came out of an academic conference), but a fire for liberty burns hot below the footnoted surface. Especially notable: This book came out long before the home-schooling movement, long before a remnant of the population began to see what was happening and started bailing out. The core truth that this book tells: The government has centrally planned your child's life and has forced both you and your child into the system. But, say the writers, the system is a racket and a cheat. It doesn't prepare them for a life of liberty and productivity. It prepares them to be debt slaves, dependents, bureaucrats and wartime fodder. I'm thinking of this book as I look at millions of unemployed young people in the US and Europe. This is what the system has produced. This is the mob that once gathered in "homeroom," assembled for school lunches, sat for endless hours in their assigned desks and was tested ten thousand times to make sure they had properly absorbed what the government wanted them to know. Now they are out and they want their lives to amount to something, but they don't know what. And it's just the beginning. There are tens of millions of victims of this system. They were quiet so long as the jobs were there and the economy was growing. But when the fortunes fell, many became members of marauding mobs seeking a father figure to lead them into the light. Think of the phrase "twelve-year sentence." They government took them in at the age of 6. It sat them down in desks, 30 or so per room. It paid teachers to lecture them and otherwise keep them busy while their parents worked to cough up 40% of their paychecks to the government to fund the system (among other things) that raises their kids. So on it goes for 12 years, until the age of 18, when the government decides that it is time for them to move on to college, where they sit for another four years, also at mom and dad's expense. What have they learned? They have learned how to sit at a desk and zone out for hours and hours, five days per week. They might have learned how to repeat back things said by their warden -- I mean teacher. They've learned how to sneak around the system a bit and have something resembling a life on the sly. They have learned to live for the weekend and say "TGIF!" Perhaps they have taken a few other skills with them: sports, music, theater or whatever. But they have no idea how to turn their limited knowledge or abilities into something remunerative in a market system that depends most fundamentally on individual initiative, alertness, choice and exchange. They are deeply ignorant about the stuff that makes the world work and builds civilization, by which I mostly mean commerce. They've never worked a day in the private sector. They've never taken an order, never faced the bracing truth of the balance sheet, never taken a risk, never even managed money. They've only been consumers, not producers, and their consumption has been funded by others, either by force (taxes) or by leveraged parents on a guilt trip. So it stands to reason: They have no sympathy for or understanding of what life is like for the producers of this world. Down with the productive classes! Or as they said in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution: "Expropriate the expropriators" Or under Stalin: "Kill the Kulaks." Or under Mao: "Eradicate the Four Olds" (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas). So too did the Nazi youth rage against the merchant classes who were said to lack "blood and honor." The amazing thing is not that this state system produces mindless drones. The miracle is that some make it out and have normal lives. They educate themselves. They get jobs. They become responsible. Some go on to do great things. There are ways to overcome the twelve-year sentence, but the existence of the educational penitentiary still remains a lost opportunity, coercively imposed. Americans are taught to love the sentence because it is "free." Imagine attaching this word to the public school system! It is anything but free. It is compulsory at its very core. If you try to escape, you are "truant." If you refuse to cough up to support it, you are guilty of evasion. If you put your kids in private school, you pay twice. If you school at home, the social workers watch every move you make. There is no end to the reform. But no one talks about abolition. Still, can you imagine that in the 18th and most of 19th centuries, as this book points out, this system didn't even exist? Americans were the most-educated people in the world, approaching near-universal literacy, and without a government-run central plan, without a twelve-year sentence. Compulsory education was unthinkable. That came only much later, brought to us by the same crowd who gave us World War I, the Fed and the income tax. Escaping is very hard, but even high-security prisons are not impenetrable. So millions have left. Tens of millions more remain. This whole generation of young people are victims of the system. That makes them no less dangerous precisely because they don't even know it. It's called the Stockholm Syndrome: Many of these kids fell in love with their captors and jailers. They want them to have even more power. Regards, Jeffrey Tucker
for The Daily Reckoning
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| | | ALSO THIS WEEK in The Daily Reckoning...
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The Biggest Fire Sale in History
by Chris Mayer
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| | | | | The Weekly Endnote...
| | | | As we mentioned earlier, there were plenty of emails responding to Mr. Tucker's thoughtful musing on the sorry state of state education. Here are a few for your consideration... First up in today's mailbag, here's what Reckoner Jean had to say... I have in recent times considered education in general, particularly financed by government, to be brainwashing!
I've often noticed young graduates, great communicators, but still wet behind the ears, forcefully promoting a view which can only come from a regurgitation of an approved authority (an expert!) of the next topic to be introduced using the most recent lingo that few understand, often an excuse for the government to establish another bureaucratic arm and funding from new revenue to be raised. All are often excellent debaters but perhaps, lack the ability to discuss and experience in life: influence, persuasion, interests, etc.
I observed at lectures how lecturers manipulated young minds which absorbed often very questionable concepts as coming from someone with an engaging personality as having authority on a topic, and wisdom.
So these highly regarded teachers, often what I would consider mediocre in wisdom, but specialists in their field have such influence. A good example is global warming, which then becomes climate change, etc. And the young sponge just can't absorb enough to then receive accolades for regurgitating work of another mediocre mind, and all being satisfied with "reflected ego": those who cannot do, teach.
Wisdom comes from understanding, experience, etc but perhaps most important, lacks ego. It is pure and truthful.
Chimes a Reckoner who goes by the moniker Rev James... On the subject of near-universal literacy prior to the US adopting the Prussian "Public School" doctrine, it is something that I learned years before the internet -- and have found numerous sources of validation since... they're not hard to find if you're not afraid to look.
I've found that, in almost every instance, those who continually lambast others for not "citing sources" are those who were the most undereducated by Public Schools; they want others to do their homework for them.
I did ok in school, as long as I was only a year or 2 ahead of my grade... once I got to the point where I was 6 or more years ahead (Jr. High), the schools were less and less able to deal with me -- they couldn't force me into a box I had so clearly outgrown, and so they punished me for their own incompetence/malfeasance.
The "Free Market" is not about the "Lowest Common Denominator" at all; quite the opposite, really. The Free Market wants and needs people with high quality education and real-world skills -- it's the "School-to-Prison Pipeline" which requires ever-lower commons to continue operating. Follow the money; for the most part, states spend 4 or more times the money on prisons as they do on schools...
Of course, not everyone sides with the promotion and celebration of individual liberty. Here's a comment from Frank...
Well, the underlying idea is that the "free market forces" should make it better. I seriously doubt that. It is more likely that that would guarantee the lowest common denominator. The free market promotes stupidity by hooking people on addictive products and services. Imagine that system in the educational system? It would all be fun and computer games and dumbifying subject matter, because it is most entertaining and most addictive. Many brilliant people have come out of basic education, but yes, a lot is missing -- e.g. Logic, psychology, philosophy, the process of thought and learning, emotional intelligence, and many more. Sure there is a problem with modern education, but to leave it to the laws of consumption would be even more mentally empoverishing [sic] and dangerous. And finally, here's one from Reckoner Texas Mom... I agree with much of what you have written. As a mom who homeschooled both of her boys they escaped most of the brainwashing-but they paid a price. Both boys were made to feel like pariahs by even their cousins for learning different things. I used Dale Carnegie and Napolean Hill's writings as a guide.
Both my boys now as young adults impress others as far beyond their years as to maturity, knowledge of the world and basic skills, (writing math, public speaking, knowledge of history and geography). But not all their peer group ended up that way, 3/4 of them grew up as aimless dilettantes, no better than if they had stayed in the holding pen called school. In life I had to learn that you must take responsibility for yourself and your loved ones. No one else, especially institutions will. --- Got something to say on the subject? As always, we welcome your thoughts. Email them to the address below and... ...enjoy your weekend. Cheers, Joel Bowman
Managing Editor
The Daily Reckoning
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Here at The Daily Reckoning, we value your questions and comments. If you would like to send us a few thoughts of your own, please address them to your managing editor at joel@dailyreckoning.com
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