From Gary Barnett at The Future of Freedom Foundation comes this brief piece on the intentional failures of the public school system. Everyone should read John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education for a better understanding of how the system was created and why. As President Woodrow Wilson said in a speech, “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than 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.
— Isabel Paterson

Compulsory schooling is a travesty. To call it education is absurd. Real education is lifelong learning as an individual, while compulsory public schooling is the indoctrination of children as a collective exercise to bring all down to the lowest level. Prisons called schools are simply the forced means to stifle individual brilliance while promoting sameness and monotony. The result of this brainwashing is meant to teach children to obey orders, and to be satisfied spending their lives in a virtual cage of ignorance, to never become entrepreneurs and dissenters.

With the recent death of the great John Taylor Gatto, the loss of a giant is evident. He was not only a pioneer in real education, but he discovered the true nature and genius that exists in so many children. The controllers who use the government school system as a way to dumb down the masses fully understand this potential genius. They are very fearful of it. So fearful in fact, that more than 100 years ago, they designed a mandatory school system as a way to control the common people. By training them to be good citizens and members of a collective society instead of individuals, the few could continue to control the many.

The experiment called compulsory schooling, now referred to as “public education,” began in Massachusetts in 1852, and became widespread just after the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910 the majority of children were in public schools. Since that time “education” as administered by the state has been a horrible failure, if learning was the desired end. But learning and knowledge were never the goals of forced schooling; training the young to honor authority, discipline, and nationalism were the true goals sought. In that regard, public schooling has been completely successful. These institutions became the vehicle used to teach children to be managed instead of managing themselves. They have produced a soft society consumed by doubt and incompetence, and one that can function only as a mass.

In order to change this dynamic, a real education is necessary, but so long as parents continue to shirk their responsibility by allowing unknown state employees to raise and train their children, things can only get worse.

John Gatto knew that teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic could be accomplished in as few as 100 hours. The improvement of those skills would be self-taught at the appropriate time and place, as self-taught persons are far more advanced than those subject to and dependent on mass schooling. Any real study of most kids educated at home will expose this truth.

As I see it, it is up to parents to save their own children. That will not be an easy task, as most parents are products of the same state-schooling system that exists today, and were taught long ago not to rock the boat or question authority. Everything should be questioned, and everything should be scrutinized. Questioning authority is the bane of the state apparatus, which is the reason compulsory schooling was implemented in the first place. It continues unabated as the dominant training discipline of this country’s young.

Take a look around and you may be shocked. How many have lost their imagination? How many seek counseling? How many feel inadequate and consider suicide? How many do you know who manage their lives by taking prescription drugs? How many are bored, emotionally wrecked, and afraid? Most of those people, a very large portion of the population, can no longer function as individuals. Such behavior should be expected, as the product turned out by the mandatory government school system has little ability to think and act without guidance. That is a direct result of being a prisoner of state-sponsored indoctrination centers from infancy to adulthood. That is why public schooling is anathema to free-thinking, self-reliant, and responsible individuals.

Mass schooling guarantees a weak and compliant population, one that has lost the ability to think critically. It is an all-consuming addiction to mediocrity, and an escape from excellence. No society can continue to be free and prosper under such conditions. Why, as John Gatto asked, are we turning our kids over to total strangers who can mold their minds with state propaganda for twelve years? It is time for parents to take back their children, and rescue them from a life of dependency.

This article was originally published in The Future of Freedom Foundation’s March 2019 issue of Future of Freedom.