 George H. Smith. Thank you. The topic for this morning is named why public education is a success. Let me say at the outset that I shall no longer use the term public education. I shall call it by its proper name, which is state education. And my discussion will be why I think libertarians should realize that, to a great extent, what we call state education, the state educational system in America today, has, in fact, been successful. Now, let me preface my more general remarks by recalling an editorial that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, or perhaps other papers, about three or four years ago. There was a pro and con discussion on the editorial page about, I think it was concerning, either tax credits or vouchers. The side defending the voucher proposals was basically a Chicago economist who argued that vouchers would make education more competitive, more efficient, less costly, et cetera. The person opposing vouchers was a man named R Freeman Butts, who's a rather distinguished historian of education of what I would call the old school. And Butts's reply was extremely interesting and extremely instructive for libertarians. At the outset, Butts said that he agreed that vouchers, tax credits, and so forth probably were more efficient. That is, you probably could get better education in a technical sense for less cost. He then went on to say, but what makes you think that the public school system ever was concerned with matters of efficiency and simply teaching kids to read and write and learn? He said the reason the public schools were established had very little to do with those purposes. They were established for social and political reasons. They were established for the purpose of what Butts calls teaching civic virtue, civic education. He went on to say that were we to have a free market in education, you would have a pluralism of systems, you would have perhaps the Ku Klux Klan teaching bigotry to their children, you would perhaps have other racists or other anti-submitting groups teaching bad values to their children. He said the reason that the common school system, as they called it in the 19th century, was established was to give Americans a certain cultural homogeneity, to impose on American children a certain common set of values. Now Butts is absolutely correct in this observation. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the American state school system clearly understands that the debate in the 19th century in America between those who are favoring an elaborate state school system and those who favored either none at all or perhaps one very minimal, the debate did not center on whether the private school or the free market could teach kids literacy skills because it was clear that there was a high degree of literacy. The literature of the 19th century in America, in France, and in England does not concern matters of we have to teach the poor kids to read and write. That barely occurs in the literature at all, if ever. The debates concern things like, what about these Irish Catholic immigrants who are coming over to America? How will they become good Protestants and good Americans? Later in the 19th century, they concerned Eastern European immigrants. There was a good deal of racism. The major purpose to put it very simply, and I'll be going into more detail in a second, was to what they call, one of the major purposes, was to Americanize the immigrants. Another term they used very commonly was to Christianize the Catholics. Now this may sound somewhat funny to you. I think I've just converted Marshall to a proponent of the state school system. What I'm getting at in general is that in any country one cares to look at, and the three that I'll be touching on briefly will be France, England, and the United States. The debates were over political and social issues. They were not over whether the free market could provide adequate education in a strict sense of teaching basic literacy skills, teaching various disciplines. Now let me also distinguish between education and schooling. Education is any general process by which one person transmits values, ideas, principles, whatever to another person. Education clearly can occur in an institutional framework, or it can occur outside of an institutional framework. It can occur with computers, television, radio, books, or in a formal setting, such as in a school. In an institutionalized context, when education occurs, we call it schooling. So the debate in the 19th century in America about education concern, not just education, but the institutional question of whether it should be in schools, organized, and run, and regulated to some extent by the government. Now, this brings me to the major theoretical point I wish to make, and the reason that I called the talk why the state education system is a success. In order to judge whether a given institution is a success or a failure, one must judge by the standard of for what purpose was that institution established. We cannot say whether a given institution is good or bad or whether it's been successful or unsuccessful unless we know what the people had in mind when they established it. Now, if you assume, as do many libertarians, that the people who established the state educational system in America wanted to achieve a high degree of skill and literacy and such, then you might say the school system has been a failure. But as I pointed out, that was not at least the primary purpose. The primary purpose was to safeguard the government against too much radicalism, against dangerous subversives, against certain values that they thought were dangerous to American society. The ideal of the common school system was kind of a citizenry that would have much in common that wouldn't be very, there would be kind of a gray uniformity about it, a kind of an Orwellian uniformity. Of course, they didn't put it in those terms, but that was the clear implication. And I would say, judged by those standards, the school system has been an astonishing success because that is the sort of product that typically comes out of the state school system in America. Now, there's another very important point that I think libertarians should take heed of. If you're going to argue effectively about free market versus state education, you're going to have to educate yourself to some extent in the history of the controversy. Now, this problem of libertarians educating themselves is not obviously confined just to the subject of state education. We are a relatively small movement, and although it's not necessary for every member of the libertarian movement to become a scholar, that's highly unrealistic, it is necessary for most members of the libertarian movement to be extremely well-educated in a number of different areas, do a lot of reading. One of those areas you should read in if you're interested in education is the history of education. A very common misconception, even among libertarians, is this. Some people believe that the idea of state education is relatively new, that because of a certain humanitarian wave or altruistic wave in the mid-19th century, suddenly this idea of let's help kids out by giving them free education, financed by tax revenues, and so forth. The point I want to make historically, and I'll be spending the remainder of my time on this, is the following. State education is, the idea of state education is extremely ancient. It goes all through ancient Greek philosophy, it goes through European philosophy throughout the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and into the modern period. State education has, the idea of state education, whether it's in the form of a formal government or a state church or some other political body, has always been the norm, so to speak. The really remarkable thing, the unusual thing, has been the idea of free market education, which has received relatively little support in Western European history throughout the years. Now, for those of you who engage in arguments, if you ever hear the argument well, to the effect of well, give me an example of a purely free market educational system and something we can compare it to. We have an excellent historical example, an excellent historical model. If you go back to ancient Greece around, say, the fifth century BC, you have two cities that are extremely well known. One is Athens, the other is Sparta. Now, when I say the word Athens to you, what do you think of? Well, a lot of people think of great achievements in literature, in art, and particularly in philosophy. They think of Athenian democracy. They think of the Age of Pericles. They think of the great philosophers. When I say the word Sparta, what do you think of? You think of an extremely militaristic, repressive society. Can you name one philosopher, one artist, one literary figure who hailed from Sparta? Sparta had no culture in any real sense. It was an extremely totalitarian culture. What was Sparta known for? And it was also known historically for its state educational system. The Spartan system was taken throughout European history as a model by many, many advocates of state schooling, including American advocates of state schooling. Even someone like Samuel Adams in his dream for what he called a Christian Sparta used the Spartan model as a precedent to argue for the necessity of state education. One of the great tragedies in Western philosophy is that the two most noted philosophers of ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle, although both of them resided in or around Athens, both of them rejected the Athenian free market system of education and favored the Spartan system instead. This was to have a profound influence all throughout European history up to the present day because Plato and Aristotle, as you know, had an enormous impact on the thinking of philosophers and particularly in the area of education. Now, I must clarify a bit. When Plato and Aristotle said they admired the Spartan system, they didn't mean they admired the militaristic values that were taught by Sparta. What they admired was the rigor and the discipline and they wished to see the Spartan system used but with Athenian values. That is, they wanted, they didn't want a pure military state, but they thought the Spartans were much more effective in educating their children. One of the reasons for this was that when Plato was a young man, the Peloponnesian wars had just ended and Sparta had defeated Athens in those wars and Plato believed that much of the reason for this was that the Athenian democracy had become corrupt. Now, when I talk about a pure model of free market education, fifth century Athens is a perfect example. There were no regulations, whatever, in fifth century Athens. The market was totally open in education. Now, let me give you, now I'm going to be going into some history here and I'll be giving you a number of quotations. Let me say the reason that I'm using the quotations is not to bore you with quotations. I think you'll find most of them interesting and most of them are rather brief, but because frankly, when I get into some of this material, you're not, if I were to paraphrase it, you would not believe me. When I start reading to you some of the reasons that the prominent state educators in America gave for a state system of education, if I were to paraphrase it, you'd probably think, well, I'm giving a rather unsympathetic slant. What did the person really say? That is the reason in many cases I'm going to give you direct quotation from the mouth of the horse, so to speak. Let's go back to Athens during the fifth century BC during the time of Socrates. There is a Socratic dialogue, which Plato wrote, in which a man named Hippocrates approaches the philosopher Socrates and he's very excited and he says, look, we have to go over because Protagoras, a man named Protagoras, who's one of the best known of the Sophists is in town and this man, Hippocrates, wanted to pay this famous teacher of wisdom, that's what the term Sophist means, for his services. At this point, Socrates in this dialogue cautions his friend. He said, a Sophist is an educational entrepreneur, quote, a merchant or peddler of the goods by which the soul is nourished, that is education. Plato's Socrates then articulates what is probably the first argument against free market education in the history of Western civilization and I'm gonna give it right from the dialogue. This is what he says, quote, we must see that the Sophist in commending his wares, now remember, the Sophists have a very bad reputation. The term Sophistry, as we know today, has a bad word, but the Sophists were basically free market teachers. They were itinerant teachers that traveled from city to city selling their educational services to whoever wished to buy them and this is why, listen to why Plato in using Socrates as a mouthpiece, disliked the Sophists. We must see that the Sophists in commending his wares does not deceive us like the wholesaler and the retailer who deal in food for the body, in other words like merchants. These people do not know themselves which of the wares they offer is good or bad for the body but in selling them praise them all, in other words they advertise and those who buy from them don't know either unless one of them happens to be a trainer or a doctor, in other words an expert in this area. So too, those who take the various subjects of knowledge from city to city and offer them for sale, retail to whoever wants them command everything that they have for sale but it may be my dear Hippocrates that some of these men are also ignorant of the beneficial or harmful effects on the soul of what they have for sale and so too are those who buy from them unless one of them happens to be a physician of the soul in other words an expert in the area of education. If then you chance to be an expert in discerning which of them is good or bad it is safe for you to buy knowledge from protagonist or anyone else but if not take care of you don't find yourself gambling dangerously with all that is dearest to you. Indeed the risk you run in purchasing knowledge is much greater than in buying provisions close quote. This is an explicit argument against free market education based on the idea that individuals are not sufficient judges of quality education and you need experts. This is an argument that many later proponents of state education were to use for example John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century. Now I want to turn for a moment and talk a little bit more about the Spartan model and Plato and Aristotle's admiration for it. As I said Plato and Aristotle were by no means unqualified admirers of Sparta but they did admire the state system of education. Plato in his blueprint of an authoritarian society the Republic is most famous work advocates the state system of centralized education under the supervision of a minister of education. He says in the words of a prominent history Greek philosophy Ernest Barker in this conception Plato was definitely and consciously departing from the practice of Athens and setting his face towards Sparta. Plato's aim the scholar continues was to combine the curriculum of Athens with the organization of Sparta. Now Plato's view of the relationship between the child and the state reflects the Spartan influence. Here's an quote from Plato. Education is if possible to be as the phrase goes compulsory for every mother's son on the ground that the child is even more the property of the state than of his parents. Close quote. Now this theme that the child is primarily the property of the state was to become the major theoretical or moral argument for state education. It was an argument that Aristotle used as well although he did not want as an authoritarian system of education as did Plato. Nevertheless Aristotle said quote the citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives which means that education should be one and the same for all. Close quote. Aristotle went on to criticize the laissez-faire free market education of Athens whereas he put it everyone looks after his own child separately and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best close quote. And he then went on to praise the Spartan model instead and here's how he put it. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself for they all belong to the state and are each of them a part of the state and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole. In this particular as in some others the Spartans are to be praised for they take the greatest pains about their children and make education the business of the state. Close quote. Now I cannot go through in any kind of detail the transmission of Plato and Aristotle's views in European culture. To put it very briefly around the 12th century Aristotle's writings were rediscovered. Some centuries later the writings of Plato become known in their full texts and the idea of the Spartan model of education becomes extremely popular due to the enormous influence of these two philosophers and European philosophers as early as the 16th century start talking about the need for a system of state education. Now I'm going to give you an example because this is one of the clearest examples possible to support my contention that the argument was not over and I'm not just talking about America or any one country this was a phenomenon taking place throughout the world or throughout the Western world France England and America being the three examples that I'm most familiar with. Let us move just very briefly even though it's not the country where we should be dealing with but I want to show you something that may surprise you. Let us move to France about the middle of the 1700s. France at that time, the educational system what we would call the high school and the high school level was very much run by various religious orders particularly Jesuits who provided free education for anyone who wanted to have it. The Jesuits were eventually expelled from France and they were hated because of their educational system. Now why did many of the Enlightenment people dislike the Jesuits teaching their children? The main argument was that the Jesuits were foreigners they weren't good Frenchmen particularly after France lost the seven years war against England there was a great outcry in France that it's because these foreigners have been teaching our children that we lost this war we need good patriotic values instilled in our children. Perhaps the most influential tract written in the mid 18th century in France was written by a Frenchman, a French politician who was a friend of Voltaire and many other notables named Lechalité. And Lechalité said how was it possible to think that men who are not concerned about the state who are accustomed to place the head of a religious order above the heads of the state their order above the country their institution and constitutions above the laws would be capable of bringing up and teaching the youth of a kingdom. The education of French children was placed in the hands of teachers subject to a foreign master and he concludes what inconsistency, what a scandal. Now, Lechalité went on to say and now this is not by the way an isolated case I could literally give you dozens of other references very similar to this in France, England and in America. Lechalité went on to say I claim the right to demand for the nation and education that will depend upon the state alone because it belongs essentially to it and because every nation has an inalienable and an inprescriptable right to instruct its members and finally because the children of the state should be educated by members of the state. Close quote. Now the interesting about Lechalité's argument and the reason I'm mentioning it is you might think well he was still concerned about teaching the poor peasants of France to read and write. Precisely the opposite is true. The major argument in France against Jesuit education was that the Jesuits would educate anyone, even poor peasants. And the argument was that they were teaching these peasant children to read and write and when these peasant children grew up they would not want to return to the farms and do the feudal system and do that type of manual labor and therefore there would be an agricultural shortage in France as a result. Lechalité was very explicit about this and so were all the supporters of French education. In other words he said that there were too many schools in France rather than too few. He said, even the common people wished to study with the result that many people disdain the calling of their fathers. And there's a further quote. The welfare of society requires that the education of the common people should not go beyond its occupations. Any man who looks beyond his trade will never work at it with courage and patience. It is hardly necessary that any of the common people should know how to read and write except those who earn their living by these arts or whom these arts help to earn their living. Lechalité assailed the Jesuits in the religious orders because he said they teach reading and writing to people who ought to learn only to draw and to handle the plane in the file but who no longer wish to do so. Close quote. This was a view incidentally with which Voltaire and many other people in favor of state education in the time were in whole agreement. Now let's move to America. As early as the late 18th century, a number of the founding fathers wished to see a system of centralized state education in America and in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle they were keenly aware of the philosophical implications of what they were saying. As many of you know, I'm sure, libertarianism is based morally on the idea of self-ownership that every person is the owner of his or her body, labor, fruits of their labor and so forth. The proponents of state education were very astute. They realized that in order morally to make a case for state education they had to deny self-ownership and defend instead some theory of state ownership of children in particular. Let's take the case of Benjamin Rush, the very well-known Philadelphia physician who later became known as the father of American psychiatry who was one of the early advocates of state schooling in America. In 1786, Benjamin Rush who was a radical, early radical caller for independence and so forth, a friend of Thomas Paines said, quote, let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself but that he has public property. Let him be taught to love his family but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. He must be taught to amass wealth but it must be only to increase his power of contributing to the wants and demands of the state. He must be taught that his life is not his own, in quotes, when the safety of his country requires it. Close quote. Now, advocates of state schooling throughout 19th century America made the same argument. As Murray Rothbard once said, this is before the age of public relations. So these people were, you don't have to read between the lines. These people were very direct and very straightforward about what they wanted. Now I'm not quoting small fries here. I'm gonna give you a few very brief quotations from very significant figures in the history of American state schooling. The first was from William T. Harris who was US commissioner of education from 1889 to 1906. Harris, under the influence of a lot of German political philosophers, argued that the individual in his words owes all that is distinctively human to the state. Close quote. As a consequence, Harris went on to argue state education is quote, a mere war measure as a means of preservation of the state, close quote. Now you know what's not being said here. He's not saying we need education to benefit young kids. He said we need education for the self preservation of the state to make sure we're not gonna have radical subversives and so forth running around. This theme recurs throughout the entire 19th century. Another example, James W. Patterson, New Hampshire state superintendent of public instruction addressed the National Education Association, Steadown Existence, the NEA, in 1881 where he argued that it is proper for the state to provide education quote, when the instinct of self preservation shall demand it. He continued, it is solely as an act of self defense that the government comes to the rescue of the schools. Now this was during an age of burgeoning American militarism and nationalism and Patterson believed it was an essential function of schools to impart what he called the genius and heroism of military arms. We find similar ideas moving to California in the writings of the most prominent Californian educator in the 19th century, John Sweat, SWETT. He was a state superintendent of schools. He was a San Francisco school superintendent during the 1890s. Now Sweat refers to children as property of the state rather than property of themselves or their parents. And he said, children arrived at the age of maturity belong not to the parents but to the state, to society, to the country. Now I'm gonna give you two last examples of this. If you think the first one's bad, wait till you hear the second. These are two very important sociologists. One of them was greatly admired by Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century. These are progressive sociologists. The first is named Charles Cooley, a very important sociological thinker. Here's what Cooley had to say about the implications of state control of education. Since the school environment is comparatively easy to control, here is the place to create an ideal formative group or system of groups which shall envelop the individual and mold his growth, a model of society by assimilation to which he may become fit to leaven the rest of his life. Here, meaning in the state schools, if anywhere, we can ensure, now get these words, we can ensure his learning, loyalty, discipline, service, personal address, and democratic cooperation. Close quote. A certain Orwellian chill starts to fill the room with these quotes. There was another, and this was the one that Theodore Roosevelt admired so much, another very important sociologist of the progressive era, Edward Ross, put it even more bluntly. And if this doesn't send chills up your spine, I don't know what will. Speaking of state schooling, Ross said, quote, to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board, exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few people ever attained to. And so he concludes, it happens that the role of the school master is just beginning. Close quote. Now, as I said, if I were to paraphrase that for you, I don't think you would believe that I was not exaggerating. Now, I'm going to go through a few of the other motives which relate to this idea of self-defense of the state. I'm going to be very brief, but I mentioned the issue of immigration before. Let me give you one example again as a typical example. Now, if these were isolated cases, I wouldn't use them. I'm honestly not taking the worst case in just giving you one example of some idiot who no one else agreed with. These were very common views argued by prominent advocates of state education. Let me ask you a question. If I tell you that the major campaign for what they then called the common school system, that was what Horace Mann called it, which we now call the state school system, began in earnest in the 1840s in America, can you think of what else was going on in the 1840s in America? Does anything occur to you that might be relevant? Okay, well, in this case, I think, okay, well, in this case, what was going on in Ireland was the Irish potato famine. And there was a massive influx of Irish into America at this time, particularly in New York and in Massachusetts. Guess which two of the states were at the forefront of advocating state schooling at that time in the 1840s? Massachusetts and New York. They had thousands of Irish Catholics pouring into these cities. Now, as I went through before about the problem of Christianizing the Catholics in this, let me just give you one passage from an important journal in the round 1850 called The Massachusetts Teacher, where it was made very clear what the purpose of state schooling was supposed to be. Quote, with the old, meaning with the old immigrants, not much can be done, but with their children, the great remedy is education. Now, they're referring to Irish Catholics here. The rising generation must be taught as our children are taught. We say must be because in many cases, this can be accomplished only by coercion. In too many instances, the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. If left to their direction, the young, the Catholic Irish young, will be brought up in idle, dissolute, vagrant habits, which will make them worse members of society than their parents are. Instead of filling our public schools, they will find their ways into our prison houses of correction and almshouses. Now, this next passage is a gem. Nothing can operate effectually here, but stringent legislation, thoroughly carried out by an efficient police, and children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests with pre-citalized must be held accountable and punished, close quote. Now, where is the rhetoric about the poor kids who won't get educated if we don't have a state system? Where are the crocodile tears over the ghetto kids and the poor children? This is real politics. I mean, this is the way the real world is operating. It says, the stuff you hear today about how will poor kids get educated in a free market system is an after-the-fact rationalization because they could not get away with this kind of garbage today, and they know it. Another very important motive was, as I said before, was the rise of nationalism. Let's return back to John Swett, the California State Superintendent of Schools, when he was running for the State Superintendent of Schools, his campaign. His campaign took place around the time of the Civil War, and Swett was very clear about what he thought qualified him to be the State Superintendent of Schools. He bragged that he was a union man in every fiber of his body, and as the Superintendent of Schools in California, he promised, in his words, to make California Union to the backbone. He said the State Schools are the great nurseries of patriotism. He went on to say, cast your eye over the map of our country today 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. He said, the crowning achievement of the public schools, in his words, is that they have educated an army of half a million of men who have volunteered to sustain the national flag with the bayonet. That was quote. Now, you can't be much more explicit than that. Let me move to this later wave of immigration which took place in the late 19th century. Now, I'm going to quote a passage from a book which was the most commonly used, it was used for decades in colleges where they instructed teachers. The author is Elwood Cumberley, who was very well known in Stanford, very revered even today by historians of state education, and he wrote a book called Public Education in the United States or wrote a number of other texts, but these were used for decades, and you have to understand these were used from about 1915 through the 1930s at least in America. In his book, Public Education in the United States, Elwood Cumberley complains or discusses the immigration which occurred after 1882 in America, which he said consisted of mainly of European and Southern Europeans, Eastern and Southern Europeans who, in his words, quote, being largely illiterate, docile, lacking in initiative and almost wholly without the Anglo-conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law, order, public decency in government, served to dilute tremendously our national stock and to weaken and corrupt our political life. He went on to say that state education was supposed to combat in his words this serious case of racial indigestion. Now, I'm going to follow this up with another little ditty from Edward Ross, the guy about little plastic lumps of dough on Social Needing Board. Now, Ross, being one of the foremost American sociologists, I'm sure, prided himself on a scientific method. In a discussion of the problem of immigration in the late 19th century, Ross wrote an article for The Century Magazine, which is very widely read in that time, kind of like time would be today, wrote an article on the problem of the various racial stocks that were coming into America at the time, and the problems that were being created. Now, this is a very respected social scientist. Now, he doesn't have his statistical data in here to back up these conclusions he reaches, but listen to the language of a man highly respected, had the ear of the president of the United States, and is discussing the problem of the new races coming into America in the late 19th, early 20th century. In this article he wrote for Century Magazine, he assessed various immigrant stocks, and he said, quote, the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is subcommon. He went on to say, it is reasonable to expect an early falling off in the frequency of good looks in the American people. It is unthinkable that so many persons with crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads can mingle their heredity with ours without making personal beauty yet more rare among us than it actually is. So much ugliness is at last bound to work to the surface. Now, of course, being a scientist, he's not going to stop at generalizations. He's going to be very specific about various races. So he ran through the problem with each various race that was coming, each nationality was coming in. The Irish, he said, are good after-dinner speakers, but he said, quote, they give us good salesmen and successful traveling men. He went on to say, unfortunately, however, they are often afflicted with, quote, slackness, unthrift, and irresponsibility, close quote. Germans, he said, all those strong, are, quote, too stocky for grace, and their slow reflexes make them poor competitors in sports. Scandinavians, he said, are deficient in what he called visual imagination, while Italians have, quote, a propensity for personal violence. In a parenthetical remark he observed in his words, it is generally agreed that the Southern Italians lie more easily than Northern Europeans. He said, the Sicilian with those darting eyes and hands will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a game of cards. Slavs, oh yes, the Slavs. Slavs, he said, are notorious wife-beaters. The most numerous group among the Slavs, the Poles are, quote, unclenly, intemperant, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on women and children, close quote. He said, they congregate together in an attempt to preserve what he called a rancid bit of the old world. He went on to say, and probably the first unintentional Polish joke, when a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost, close quote. Now, of course, any good racist, as many of these progressives were, could not ignore the Jews. The Jews, he said, avoid hard muscular labor and prefer instead to supervise, speculate, and finance. Quote, none can beat the Hebrew at a bargain. None can beat the Hebrew at a bargain for through all the intricacies of commerce he can send his prophet, close quote. Eastern European Jews in particular, he said, tend to pursue gentile women. They have an extremely bad reputation for lying, and he concludes this scientific survey of the various nationalities by saying, quote, the insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. What's wrong with you? Now, as I said, I couldn't find any footnotes where the studies had been done, but presumably his statistical data occurs in some scholarly journal, but this was written for a popular audience. This is not a parody, folks. This guy was deadly serious and was taken as deadly serious by many who read him. Now, this is another example of what I mean when I say to you that if I were to try to paraphrase this that you would not, I don't think, believe that anyone that prominent would have the nerve to say something like that. Now, let me just, in a way of kind of closing up here, I want to deal with one very important figure. Now, I'm not saying that these people were all, every person of all the state schooling movement had conspiratorial motives and such. They just thought, this is the way they thought. This is the way they were quite serious. They saw nothing wrong with this. Let's take the case of John Dewey. He had an enormous impact, an enormous impact on the educational thinking of American educators. Dewey's model of a society was what he called a corporate society. And Dewey was quite explicit about what he wanted to do with the schooling system. He heralded the transition from what he called the old individualism to the new individualism. He wrote in 1931, we may say that the United States has steadily moved from an earlier pioneer individualism to a condition of dominant corporateness. This new social corporateness, he said, requires that we replace the old rugged individualism for a new individualism that stresses the unity of the individual and society. He said the old individualism was characterized in his words by ideas of pecuniary profit. And he said, this is the chief obstacle, again quoting, to the creation of a type of individual whose pattern of thought and desire is enduringly marked by consensus with others. Don't you love that? Enduringly marked by consensus with others. Now, how is this new individualism to be acquired? Only he said through the controlled use of all the resources of the science and technology that have mastered the physical forces of nature. Now, in other words, here is the ideal of the scientific expert who is the social planner. Applied to the school system. Dewey's model of society was a corporate society, a planned society, planned by social experts employing the scientific method. It is therefore no surprise that Dewey was a great admirer of the Soviet school system. Although he expressed his satisfaction with the content, it's similar in the way that Plato and Aristotle didn't like the content of the Spartan system. But they said, if only we could use their method and apply our own values, good democratic values. Although he didn't like the values of the Soviet system, he admired the method. He said, he was sure that future historians of our times will admire those who had the imagination first to see that the resources of technology might be directed by organized planning to serve chosen ends. Close quote. Indeed, he went on to say, the Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation. Now, Dewey's fascination with a centrally planned and administered school system is further illustrated by his remark that, referring to World War I, quote, war has revealed the possibilities of intelligent administration. Close quote. Now this is not to say that people like Dewey liked the war, but what did they like about World War I? Because everything became centralized. The government took over everything. Have you ever, yeah, I think Ronald Reagan even wants to use this. An early progressive thinker, William James, wants to use the phrase, the moral equivalent of war. Do you know why that phrase was used? The reason it was used in that period was because these people admired and wanted the sort of state central control that they saw during wartime, but they didn't particularly like people being killed. So they asked themselves, how can we have that type of centralized system but without war? William James said, we need the moral equivalent of war. Consequently, throughout American history, we've had things like the war on poverty, the war against ignorance, the war against this, the war against that. You can fill in all the blanks. Whenever you hear, we must fight a war against this or that, or the moral, this will be the moral equivalent of war. The whole idea is there, we all have to pull together, which means really that somebody will be forcing us to do something that we wouldn't ordinarily do. In other words, the point of this whole argument is that we cannot have a diverse pluralistic society where people have their own religious, cultural, national values. We must have one common value system which is directed and planned by a certain group of social experts. Now, the point here is that modern educators basically think the same way, modern state educators. They don't put it in such obnoxious language, but they clearly see themselves as the experts who know what children should be taught. They talk about teaching, now they talk about teaching democratic values. I mean, the rhetoric has softened, you understand. I mean, you've all heard this. If you listen to Albert Schenker or some spokesperson for the NEA, they talk about teaching the values of democratic cooperation or civic virtue and this sort of thing. But nevertheless, the rationale has remained basically the same. Going back to what I said in the beginning of my talk, the point that R. Freeman Butts made when he said, what made you think that the school systems were ever set up for efficiency and to teach reading and writing? Butts was perfectly right and well, he should he know because he's one of the best known historians of American education. Now, this leads me to what I call a kind of an answer to a paradox. People aren't even aware of the paradox, which is kind of puzzling. If you accept the premise that the school system exists primarily, the state school system exists primarily for the benefit of the child rather than for the benefit of the state. But it seems rather peculiar that attendance has to be compulsory. That is, if you offer a quote free, it's tax supported, but you don't pay a fee for going, if you offer a free good or service, economics would tell us that you'd have far more people who want it than the supply could meet. I mean, obviously demand would far exceed supply if goods and services were free, right? That's why there's a price mechanism to regulate supply and demand. So isn't it strange that if the school system exists primarily for the education of children rather than some other purpose, why then are children forced to go? It seems to me that they couldn't have enough facilities to keep all the kids that wanted to come or the parents who wanted to send their kids. Now that doesn't make any sense in economic terms, that you have a free service and yet you have to force people to consume it. There's something obviously wrong here. The answer is, and the point I have been trying to make, is that the rationale for the school system has always been for reasons of state, in which case it makes perfect sense that you have to force children to go. This has been declared explicitly in any number of Supreme Court decisions where there's been fights over the right of parents, say Amish or whatever, to withhold their children from the public school system. I could give you many passages I won't. I'm just gonna give you one as an example. In 1902, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, in a decision of this sort, presented the argument for compulsory attendance in no uncertain terms. And this type of decision was repeated over and over again in state Supreme Courts and the United States Supreme Court. And here's how the Supreme Court of New Hampshire put it. Free schooling furnished by the state is not so much a right granted to pupils as a duty imposed upon them for the public good. If they do not voluntarily attend the schools provided for them, they may be compelled to do so. While most people regard the public schools as the means of great advantage to the pupils, the fact is too often overlooked that they are governmental means of protecting the state from the consequences of an ignorant and incompetent citizenship, close quote. As I said, that basically is the legal rationale even today. Now, it's an interesting question as to what the role of libertarians historically has been in this battle. I'm sorry to say that in America, very few libertarians recognize the danger of state schooling to the extent that they should have. And therefore there was never really any organized resistance among libertarians of the 19th century to the establishment of state schools. The same was not true, however, in England. Between approximately 1843 and 1860 in England, there was a very vocal, articulate, and hardcore libertarian movement, particularly among the so-called dissenters in England, meaning Protestants who were not members of the Church of England, particularly Congregationalists in Baptist who put out an enormous amount of literature opposing in-principle state schooling, giving every argument and even more that libertarians have used today. I wrote an article on this movement in that book published by the Pacifica Foundation, which is, I think, on sale in the book room called the Public School Monopoly. It's called 19th Century Opponents of State Education, where I go through this English movement. It's a tremendous literature that historians have completely ignored, and the arguments are very, very sophisticated. But what I want to conclude with one passage from one of the members of this movement, John Harris, who was a Congregationalist minister who was a teacher as well. And Harris hit it right on the nose in terms of what was going on in the 19th century. And this is the point I want to, this is kind of the lesson I want to leave you with this morning. Harris was very aware that in the 19th, in the mid-19th century in England in particular, there had been tremendous strides made toward freedom of trade, freedom of press, freedom of religion. In other words, all the civil and economic liberties had been increasing over the past half decade from, say, 1800 to 1850. But he noticed at the same time that the movement for state education was also increasing. Now, Harris pointed out clearly, as did many of these people, that this was an inconsistency. How can we explain this? Here's how he put it. How inconsistent that at the moment when the cry for free trade has prevailed, when the press has risen above censorship, when religion is struggling for emancipation, and those who sympathize in the struggle daily increase, and when education itself is rapidly advancing, both in efficiency and amount, and all sects and parties are nobly vying with each other in competition, that this should be the moment selected to oppress it with law, close quote. Now, there's an important lesson here. These 19th century opponents of state education, these libertarians recognized that the movement against state education and for a free market in education was at one piece with a movement for civil liberty. In other words, they recognized that although economic arguments regarding efficiency can be used as part of the general case for free market education. In other words, it's important to point out that you can get better schooling at less cost. That's important, but that, if anything, is a minor component of the argument. The real argument rests on two points. First, the moral foundation. Do we defend self-ownership, or do we defend some theory of state ownership of the child? The second is a broad conception of linking up the crusade for free market and education with civil liberties. It is a civil liberty in the same sense that freedom of the press is, freedom of religion is, freedom in any other sphere. Those are the two major points at which this dispute has to be taken to the public. Economic arguments for efficiency can then be brought in to support those further. The thing, if I were to pinpoint one mistake that I think libertarians make in their arguments for tax credits and ways of trying to loosen up the public school system and make it more competitive, I think the major mistake they make is they concentrate too much on the economic arguments as the sole basis of their argument. They don't realize that the school system does not rest on that premise. And if I were to leave you with a piece of advice, it would be this, that I think we should look to a certain extent to how the fundamentalist Protestants have approached this issue, setting up their own schools and kind of thumbing their nose at the government saying this is our business and stay out of our lives. We have a right to teach our kids like we want. That is basically what the issue is. And not that economic arguments cannot be used, but I think again, that if we're going to make any headway at all, we have to link the issue of education to a broader movement, a broader crusade for civil liberties and for the right of self-ownership. Thank you very much. Yeah, I guess we have a few minutes for questions. Yes. Well, Sam Adams was an early proponent of a state system of education. Yes, the same same as the revolution, yes. That's a rather complicated story as to why many of these early revolutionary forefathers supported state schooling. I couldn't go into it here in detail. It is covered in our manuscript in the book on education. There are, I should note that there are important differences among state schoolers in America. There are people who wanted a much more comprehensive system like the Horace Mann type, so-called father of the common schools. Someone like Thomas Jefferson as an example is a contrast because Jefferson, although he favored state schooling, he wanted a very minimal amount like three years and all it was supposed to do was teach reading and writing. The big difference between a Jeffersonian advocacy of state schooling and a, say a Horace Mann or a more statist advocacy of state schooling is that Jefferson perhaps naively in this case believed that if you just taught kids to read and write, a literate population could then stand as a bulwark against the encroachment of state power. That if kids can at least read, then the state won't be able to mold them and manipulate them and dictate to them. But it wasn't the Jeffersonians who went out and I think the Jeffersonians were naive in their belief that once you set up an institution like that, the state will use it for its own ends. The state will never use an institution to do anything that will in any sense constitute a threat to its own existence. And that I think is what I call the Achilles heel of that American Republican tradition of the Jeffersonian tradition. It was a well-intentioned mistake in a sense on Jefferson's part and on the part of his followers, but to think that they could establish an institution like that and not have it constantly take on more power to itself, I think was extraordinarily naive. Yes? What has been? I'm not really up on the most recent cases regarding the position on ACLU. It's my recollection in the Amish case did not they defend the, I think they helped finance the defense of the Amish in that case. So they deserve a plus on that score. I don't know if they've taken an official position on compulsory attendance or not. I'm very suspicious of the ACLU. I mean, sometimes they happen to hit on right positions other times not, but certainly it seems to be a matter of accident when they do and don't. They don't base it on a self-ownership idea. Yeah. So the only schools have a successful house? Well, the thing about, the thing about institutions is institutions, despite the plans of their, let me put it this way, the bad guys who plan this institution have the same problem with planning that anyone has in planning an institution. Once you set up the institution, it's not always the goal you want that gets achieved. What usually happens, and I'm not saying that these people wanted kind of robotic types that have just gone through an S seminar, walking around Joe that will do uncritically anything they're told. But I think what has happened in the institution is once you get an entrenched institution, the self-interest of the people in the institution becomes their paramount concern. And in order not to threaten their own security, what happens is they don't want to go too far one way or too far the other and everything becomes kind of this uniform grade dullness, kind of this pale kind of goes over the institution. So to a certain extent they were successful in the 19th century in that Americanization Crusade, but I think today it would be rather silly to say that that's the purpose of the public school system. I think today the purpose of the public school system is to keep in relatively good living conditions a large army of bureaucrats who work for the system itself. I frankly think not that some of these people aren't good in tension and don't care about kids, but I think that they've convinced themselves that the welfare of children is inextricably tied to their receiving a regular paycheck from a state school system. People have a way of rationalizing what's best for kids and the public in general and it just happened coincidentally happens to hinge on them being employed by the state at the same time. Yes, sir. The reason was because the Congregationalists in England had a long history of religious persecution by the Church of England. After the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy in 1660, there were all kinds of laws and acts passed which severely restricted the right of dissenters to educate their children. The so-called dissenting academies which were private institutions set up in England in the 18th century were efforts by the dissenters to educate their children in the way they wished to educate them. So they had two or three centuries of a history of battling the establishment. You see what I'm saying? When you're the persecuted minority, you suddenly develop an ideology and you develop your own institutions that are against the status quo. The Congregationalists in New England, the Americans, were themselves the powers that be and that's the primary difference. They're developed an entirely different ideology among the different, it's nothing intrinsic to say Congregationalist religion or the Baptist religion. It was the conditions of the time and whether you were the person wielding the club or whether you were the person getting beaten by the club. And if you look in the history of libertarian thought, many of the very good libertarians like Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, the Englishman who supported the American Revolution, all these people came from a dissenting background. They were Congregationalist Unitarians, that sort of thing. Yes, in the back. Okay, so there's a whole body of literature that came out starting in the early 70s really called revisionism on the history of American education. Now, it was a healthy trend and it's still going on. But it primarily was written by historians who were educated in the 60s and were very left leaning, in many cases Marxists. Now, they were astute, there's a lot of books out now that criticize the public school system. But they do it on the grounds of what you're saying, that they find these quotes like we wanna educate a docile population that will serve the capitalist status quo. Well, they're reading very selectively. Those type of quotations do exist, but they exist in the wider context of wanting obedient citizens of the state. What these revisionists have done is they've imposed their own ideology and selectively picked out certain legitimate points about the motives of state educators. But they fail, and this is where libertarians, you see, because of the ideology, have the edge over the left. Because we can agree with the Marxists to a certain extent that yes, there were these motives and the quotes they give are quite correct. But it was part of a more general concern for a homogeneous population. It was a crusade against cultural diversity. See, libertarians have a theory, a very important theory of spontaneous order, meaning unplanned order. We have a theory of a market where we can account for how order can arise without any central planner. It's very important to apply that same theory to social and cultural diversity. That is, can you have a social order where you have many different social and cultural values in that society? I think libertarians, because of their economic theory of spontaneous order, can explain that very well. But it's been largely assumed that if you're going to have any type of peaceful society, you have to impose certain civic values on everyone. And I think the point here is that, and this is the point Herbert Spencer incidentally made, the Great Libertarian of the 19th century, the point is that, first of all, when you force kids into school, you don't teach them about liberty because they learned very early that they don't have any liberty. And secondly, the way you teach kids about liberty is you don't sit up there and preach at them. That's not the way people learn about liberty. People learn about liberty from living in a free society and having to take the consequences of their own actions. And if you raise children in an environment where they realize that if they destroy property, they'll have to pay reparations. If they live peacefully, they'll get along well, et cetera, that will teach them the value of liberty. That's where a free society will come out of. It's from the cause-effect relationship by interacting with your fellow human beings then reinforced by education. But you're not going to raise free citizens by forcing them into us kind of a slave camp and then preaching to them about the virtues of liberty. I think we're out of time here, so thanks again.