I further explained that the public school system in America was the cause of, rather than the solution to, the scourge of illiteracy that exists in the country. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, over 40 million Americans read at the lowest level of proficiency.[11] And while funding for public education has doubled in real terms over the last 15 years,[12] there has been little discernable increase in the reading proficiency of the average, 8th-grade, American student which remains at an abysmally low level.[13]
I also endeavored to explain that, contrary to the widely believed canard that the public school system was instituted to educate America's youth, early proponents of public schooling openly admitted that their true purpose was to forcibly inculcate children with an abiding devotion to the state. As Edward Ross, a progressive sociologist, wrote in his 1901 treatise Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order,
- To collect little plastic lumps of human dough
from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board. …
And so it happens that the role of the schoolmaster in the social economy
is just beginning.[14]
- Cast your eye over the map of our country to-day,
and show me a section of States from which men shed their blood most
freely in battle for the defense of the Union, and I will show you that
such States have also expended the most money for public schools …. [The
public school system's] crowning achievement is that they have educated
an army of half a million of men who have volunteered to sustain the
national flag with a bayonet.[15]
- With the old not much can be done; but with their children, the great
remedy is education. The rising generation must be taught as our own
children are taught. We say must be, because in many instances this can
only be accomplished by coercion. … Nothing can operate effectually here
but stringent legislation, thoroughly carried out by an efficient police;
the children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who
resist or impede this plan, whether parents or
priests, must be held accountable and
punished.[16]
[12] "Digest of Education Statistics" (National Center for Education Statistics), table 27.
[13] "Learner Outcomes" (National Center for Education Statistics), table A-9-2.
[14] Edward Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (Transaction Publishers, 2009 [Macmillan, 1901]), p. 166.
[15] John Swett, Public Education in California: Its Origin and Development (American Book Company, 1911), pp. 143–146.
[16] W.M.D. Swan (ed.), Massachusetts Teacher 4, no. 10 (1851).
taken from: Refusing to Be Counted, Thursday, June 17, 2010 by Vijay Boyapati http://mises.org/daily/4481
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