 So today, we're going to talk about education. And this is based on a book by Murray Rothbard called Education Free and Compulsory. It's a bit difficult to translate into French because free has a double meaning, freedom, or free of charge. And you can't really do that in French. But nonetheless, I try to convey the essence of this book rather than a blow-by-blow account of every single paragraph. And I will try to not preach to the choir, I'll try to aim for a normie. So this person is a normal person. A normal person is a person who has not taken the red pill. This is the red pill and the blue pill here. So if you take the blue pill, which the normie has taken, then you can't believe in what you always believed. And if you take the red pill, which is this one here, then you see how far deep the rabbit hole you can go. And maybe you end up in a boardroom at this conference. And just to make my life even harder, I will try to convey the essence of Murray Rothbard's book to a French normie. So it's very difficult to do that because public education is very much a sacred cow in France. You can't actually criticize the very existence of public education in France without being kicked out of the dinner party, basically. So tough challenge. So to get started, this man was the prime minister of France. And on June 2, 1997, he made a calculation mistake. The reason why he did that is because he's a socialist. And we know socialists cannot calculate. So I'll go back to that in my third section. But what was the mistake? The mistake was that he appointed, as minister for public education, this gentleman. So you can see right there the mistake. This man has bookshelves. They're filled with books. He's actually read these books. These are scientific books. He actually even wrote some of them. And more than that, he actually wrote some articles that were cited 500 times. Typical article, basalt, basalt weathering laws. The guy is a real scientist. And you should never appoint a real scientist or a real university professor as minister of public education because he may have some ideas. You have to make him minister of transport if you want, but definitely not education. So obviously, the mistake was consummated. What was unavoidable happened 22 days after the appointment. And Claude Alegre, the minister, pronounced this phrase, which has become absolutely famous in France, which is, the mammoth has to slim down. The mammoth has to slim down. That's the only thing he said. Well, obviously, from the context, you can tell what the mammoth is. The mammoth is the national education in France. Indeed, when I was a hostage of the French national education when I was young, there was he saying that public education in France was the third largest employer in the whole world after the Red Army and General Motors. Not sure if it was true, but it was what people thought. And so the French public education has a lot of resources visibly, but does it employ them well? To do that, we can take the purest product of French public education. And his name is Laurent Laforgue. So that's him. He is just receiving the Fields Medal, which is the highest decoration in the field of mathematics. As you know, there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, supposedly because Alfred Nobel's wife slept with a mathematician. Not verified. It wasn't me, certainly. And so the Fields Medal is as close as you're going to get. And it's actually pretty good. It's more like the Nobel Prize in chemistry, physics, or medicine. And it's not at all like those crazy Nobel prizes in literature, or peace, or god forbid economics. It's pretty serious stuff. So obviously, when you have such intellectual royalty in France, you want to appoint him to the High Commission for Education. The High Commission for Education. And this is what he did. He did a paper on the Drinfeld Stuckas. You can't make that up. It's pure mathematics. The Drinfeld Stuckas. When he was young, when he was at school, when he was a teenager, this guy would actually lock himself up in his parents' bathroom because it was the only room in the house in the apartment that had no light. And then he would turn off all the lights, and then he would roll a towel underneath the little crack of the door to make sure that the light doesn't even go through the crack in the door. And there, in the dark, he'd do algebraic topology in his head for hours. So that's sort of what he takes to get the fields metal. And that's not in his official biography, but I actually know it. So he got appointed to the High Commission for Education. And Lafogue is a serious guy. He actually took his job seriously. He said, well, I'm going to approach this in a scientific method. So I am going to read all the programs for French public education. Since 1881, when it was instituted by Jules Ferri, all the way till the present, I'm going to decide which is the best program. So he did all this analysis, took a lot of time, a lot of work. And he concluded the best programs were from 1923. So that means from 1923 from 80 or 90 years onwards, it's all been going downhill. Every single reform has been horrible. So that's his conclusion. And he was appointed to the High Commission on November 8. He gave his report on November 16. And he was fired on November 17. That was pretty quick. Which starts to beg the question, is the French state, or any state for that matter, the right institution to educate children? Is it capable of introspection? Is capable of maybe finding its own limits in the field of education? Is capable of reforming itself? And the bigger question is, rather than look for the next reform, maybe we should just question the premise. Maybe the nation state was never the institution that should have been taking care of education. So that's the question I want to ask. And there is no better guide to ask this question than the book by Murray Rothbard, Education Friend Compulsory. So there'll be three parts. One part on history of public education, how education became to be a public affair. And economic, there'll be some sort of more general philosophical considerations. I'll finish with an economic analysis of the provision of education services by the state. So start with the history. Today, it's actually almost impossible to imagine a system of education that would not be run by the nation state. So we just sort of assume it has to be done like that. However, that cannot possibly be true, because the nation state was instituted by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, as we know it. Generally, that's really the basis of everything. And clearly, there was education before 1648, at least since the days of Karl Der Gross or Charlemagne. There was education and lots of philosophers, thinkers, mathematicians, scientists. So they must have been educated somehow. So clearly, that predated the nation state. You could have other institutions in the state producing education. It could be the maybe local institutions, the religious institutions. It could be charitable institutions. The families, small groups of families could get together by affinity. There are many ways to think about that. You could have professional leagues of carpenters teaching carpentry, for example. You could have outside a big university that could be a microcosm of preparations for the entrance exams. Many things you could do. And nowadays, you could have homeschooling and the Khan Academy. So the Khan Academy is on the internet. So basically, you can learn everything you want from there. And it's very, very good. So the possibilities are limitless. And indeed, before the state took over education, the variations were infinite. So there's one thing that I want you to remember today from this talk is that all the features of public education that you are familiar with, they're actually not very natural at all. They come from the Prussians. So if you think that the public schooling in France is a bit authoritarian, there's a reason for that. Because it was invented by the Prussians and copied later on. So what happened is that, obviously, now the message is changing. You don't teach God and the King as the message. Now the message is more about the environment and human rights. But the technique for teaching it is still exactly Prussian. In October 14, 1806, the French emperor Napoleon I inflicted a vicious defeat upon the king of Prussia at the Battle of Yenna. And the generals of the king, rather than admit that they had fallen to a superior strategist, put the blame on the little guy, on the soldiers. The soldiers were not sufficiently willing to sacrifice themselves for the king. So that was a theory. And then the solution then was to start a program of youth education to instill Germanic values into the German children before they go into battle. There's a Chinese saying, which is that you have to twist the cucumber when it's young. So that's what they did. And so I'm citing here from Rothbard some of the appalling things that they did were they abolished semi-religious private schools. All education was placed under the authority of the Ministry for Interior. There was a state exam that was made compulsory. All teachers had to be vetted by the state. And there was a sophisticated bureaucracy was put in place to manage schooling in all the cities and in the countryside. And then in order to get into the civil service or into university or into the professions, you had to take some state-administered exams. So all these things, which we take for granted now, that's really the way education is organized, they were actually completely unnatural. And they were invented by the Prussians. OK. So once they had taken control of education through these authoritarian means, they organized the school exactly like the army by age cohorts. So that's a bit unnatural also. To put me with, if I'm 16 with other 16-year-olds, maybe I'd be better off with 17-year-olds or with a variety of people. But in the army, you're all the same age. And there was obviously a lot of propaganda about national pride. And there was also a real effort to prevent children from learning the languages of the enemies. So that, for example, in France, we say, oh, no, no, no, you cannot learn any language until you're at least 12 or 13 or 14 because it's too complicated. And now we know obviously from linguistics research that it's easier to learn a language when you're two than when you're 12. And certainly, if you look at the aristocracy before the French Revolution, they all spoke many languages. And maybe they had private tutors who teach them in languages from the earliest age. So that was the technique that was used by the Prussian model. And well, did it work? The answer is, unfortunately, yes, it worked really well. So this is the revenge. So Yenai was 1806. It was a revenge. It's 1871, the Franco-Prussian war. And to the left, we have the defeated Napoleon III at Sedan, where he was caught. And to the right, we have Bismarck having a little friendly chat with him. So it worked really well. And the soldiers from the Prussian army were very willing to get shot in order to save the homeland. Indeed, Leon Gambetta, who was a Parisian politician who was famous for getting away from Paris in a hot-air balloon while it was encircled by the Prussians, he said, it is not the Prussian general who won the war. It is the Prussian schoolmaster. And it will be up to the French schoolmaster to win the next war. That was in 1871. So it's very prophetic. So after the defeat, what did France do? France, the cradle of human rights, democracy, the republic. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to do it Prussian style. Just copied everything from the Prussian schoolmaster. And they started the French public education in 1881. The big offender there was Jules Ferry. I don't like his beard. He's really a bad person. Even at the time, in 1888, there was a Parisian counselor named Louis Fiot who wrote a book saying, Jules Ferry, a malphiteur publique, so a public malefactor or public criminal, so first class criminal. So what was his crime? And basically, a crime of Jules Ferry was that he pretended he liberated the minds of the little children by educating them. But he wasn't really doing any of that. He just replaced propaganda for monarchy and for Christianity or Catholicism, which was really very deeply embedded in the school system prior to him, with propaganda for the republic and for atheism. So he just replaced one type of propaganda by the other. That's really what the whole book here is saying. And so it's not exactly liberating. The worst offender from this era was this little book here, Le Tour de la France par 2 Enfants, means Going Around France by 2 Children. And it's the story of two little boy and his sister who are from that part of France that is basically Germanic speaking. And they eat, sort of like Germans eat, that was taken over by the Prussians in 1870, 1871. So it's Alsace and Lorraine. So you have two children from there. And obviously, they get kicked out by the Prussians. And they go all around France, in all the regions of France, to see their relatives. And every time, they say, oh, we'd really like to go back. And then at the end of the book, they look over the border. And they see the little village over there, but they can't go back because it's Prussia now, or it's Germany now. So this is the book where most children learn how to read. So the first thing you read is you have to get these pieces of land from the Germans back. That's the first thing you read. Millions of copies were printed, I think, 8 million in total. And we have some modern French philosophers, Jacques Monazouf, who said this was the little red book of the French Third Republic. And my grandmother learned to read in this one. But she wasn't aware there was going to be a propaganda unit. So did it work? Did it work? Well, yes, it worked quite well. Certainly, we had World War I. So in 1914, everybody really went out fighting. In French, we say la fleur-au-fusie means they put flowers in their guns because they were so happy to go fighting. So that really worked. It was very effective. And so here we have the first lesson about free public education because Jules Ferri sent these teachers into all the little villages in France. And they were free. Come, give us your sons. We're going to teach them how to read and write and count for free. It's great. It's free, paid for by the taxpayers. But it wasn't really as free as advertised because after 1914, in every village, there was a monument to the dead of World War I, like this one. So it wasn't exactly free, it was paid for by the blood of your sons and grandsons. Nobody told them that initially. And so that goes under that there's no such thing as a free lunch kind of thing. Or another saying would be that sometimes it is those things in life that are free that are the most expensive. So that's the history part. Now we're going to go to more philosophical considerations about can we trust the state to educate our children? And clearly, if you look at the original history of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, that sort of starts as a no. But maybe things are better now. It's the current year. It's 2016, maybe we can trust the state. So let's think about that. And the first remark that I would like to make on this point is that prior to the takeover of the education by the state, there was what is known as a division between the spiritual power and temporal power. So temporal power is the power in this earth. And spiritual is more in the next life or more of the power of the mind. The spiritual power was in the hands of the church and the temporal power was in the hands of the state. So there was a bit of counterbalance which worked in favor of the little people. But just logically, once you start to educate the children, then you put ideas in their minds. And the mind is spiritual. So now we have a fusion of the spiritual power to educate and of the temporal power to basically as a person who has the guns. So as a result, the state says, not only will I tell you what to think, but if you disagree with me, I can throw you in jail because I've got the guns and you don't. And you're going to think, well, it cannot happen here. We are in democracy. This is the current year. No, it's not possible. Let's just give you one example from Germany. Hans Professor Hoppe is German. So in Germany, the statistics are that from 2001 to 2010, according to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, it's a bit of evil sounding kind of name, but it exists, there were 140,000 criminal investigations for thought crimes. So thought crime is not just something George Orwell's book. It's actually in the books of the reports of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. And this is sort of the number per year, 140,000. I'm not saying all of them were thrown into jail, but they had to answer some pretty tough questions. And some of them were thrown into jail. And this particular data, I probably shouldn't say that, but I will not name names, was collected from the official report of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution by a German thought criminal who spent 2 and 1 half years in jail for writing chemistry thesis on the properties of prosaic acid. So you have to be very careful what you study when you're a chemist. So that was my first remark. The second remark would be that the kind of education that the state wants to produce has one tendency, tendency towards uniformization and equalization. It's always going to be like that. Certainly if you open your eyes in France, you see equality is really the objective here. And I can do no better to comment on that than to cite directly from the book by Murray Rothbard. He says that since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive towards making people equal in all or most respects is necessarily a leveling downwards. It is a drive against the development of talent, against the development of genius, variety, and reasoning power. And since it negates the very principles of human life and human growth, the creed of equality and uniformity is a creed of death and destruction, death and destruction. Murray Rothbard does not mean words, but fully agree with him. And my third remark in this chapter will be that trusting that the state has very noble intentions when it comes to educating your children, that's a little bit naive. And you do not even need to be a hardcore austral libertarian to believe that. You can take Noam Chomsky, who is a linguist from MIT and very left-wing. He's very left-wing. And he gave a conference on the world after 9-11. He said, it is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion, so I think he means New York Times or something like that, that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them. So I really like this quote because he speaks about willful and dedicated ignorance. So to remain naive, you have to make a real effort to remain naive. And this, again, from George Orwell in 1984, has a name. It's called Stop Crime. So Stop Crime is the ability that when you get to the frontier of thought crime, you have a spider sense. You're getting close to there. And you shut down all your reasoning abilities. You shut down your ability to understand analogies, to detect fallacies. And so you stop yourself from thinking before you commit a thought crime. So I think that that really describes a lot of normies out there. And I will, my last citation in this section will have to be from Professor Block because we have honored with his presence here. He wrote an article with Andrew Young, and he says that the individuals entrenched in position of power in the state are those with control over what the children learn in history, in government theory, economics, and so forth. So the result is that you have citizens who are educated by the operators of the state into how to choose the operators of the state. So I think it's very clear that we have a logical loop here. And to conclude this section, I will say that I have come to the conclusion, and I hope you follow me on that one, that asking the state to educate our children is exactly like asking the Khmer Rouge to be in charge of the High Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights. And I'm glad you find this funny because it's actually not mine. It's not my quote. It's from Laurent Laforgue, who's the guy who got fired after 10 days. So I go to the Khmer Rouge, taking over Pnom Penh in Cambodia, not friendly. So now I have probably a few minutes to finish. And the last section will be, is the state even capable of educating? So even assuming that it would want to do a good job, is it technically feasible? And the answer comes from the mentor of Khmer Rouge, Bart Ludwig von Mises, in his article entitled Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, published in 1920. He showed that if the state wants to produce a good, it's not, his paper is not about education, but it does apply in this case. The problem with public education is that it's free so that the parents, the consumers, the families, the end users, do not vote with their wallets, so they do not produce signals, which would be, well, this teacher I'm willing to hire at that price to teach that particular subject in that school. So the only way that you can see the teacher and the subject satisfy the families is if the families actually pay some money for it. So in the absence of such signal, it is impossible to organize the production of education. So the public education is about 13% of government spending in France, but how is that money spent? How is that planification going? Well, you can't really answer that because the signals, which is the satisfaction of the parents paying for education, is not produced. The school buildings are scarce. The school books are scarce. There's not an infinite number of school books. There's not an infinite number of teachers either. So how are you going to organize them into a production plan, knowing that the number of production plans is infinite? The only way to do that would be if, at the end, the parents were to signal what production meets their objectives, and because they don't, then you have chaos, or as Mises would say, you have planned chaos. The analogy here would be that the French state is no more capable of producing education than the Soviet Union was capable of filling up the supermarkets with groceries. So when Khrutchev on the left visited the US in the 60s, that's him with John F. Kennedy, he said, oh yeah, I just want to see a supermarket. So he went out with his entourage and they showed, well, there's a supermarket right there around the corner. He looked up and down, and it was full, full of tomatoes and salt and eggs and everything. They said, I know, you guys are tricking me. It's a Potemkin village. I want to have a real supermarket. I want to, I thought he went to like a few of them. After the third or fourth, he could realize that they couldn't actually stock up the shelves fast enough for him, so it must be real. And when he compared that with the typical supermarket, this is a historical picture from the Soviet Union. No, not really. That's what comes out when you have Soviet supermarkets on Google images. The groceries he returned in English. So clearly it's a bit of an error here. But yeah, you get the point. And the basic idea was that in the same way, the Soviet Union could not organize the production plans and allocation of scarce resources of production because it was not a capitalist economy and people in the end wouldn't pay the fair price. So communism doesn't work at producing things. So you could say that if this argument were correct, then it would also imply that the state is not capable of producing public health, public health care. You could say that. And you could even go further. You could say that the same argument implies that the state is not capable of producing security. And we have the book from Professor Hopper just out there on the myth of national defense, for example. So yes, you could say that and you would be right. But given that this is aimed at the normie and we're only going to take one red pill at a time. So I'm just going to focus on education today. Okay, so nice. I think my time is almost over. So I will conclude, and I hope I have convinced you that the circumstances under which the state to control of education in the 19th century were extremely dodgy. And they had no qualms about it. They actually admitted it black and white back then. Now if you say that, put it clean, correct. But they were pretty happy with explaining their reasons. Also, I hope I've convinced you that the state does not want to do a good job of educating your children because it is not in its own interest to have citizens who are able to think by themselves. And finally, I hope I've convinced you that even if the state wanted to do a good job, it still couldn't because in the absence of the price signal generated every time a parent pays for education of his or her child in a certain way. In the absence of the signal, you can't actually organize production in an economically correct way, okay? So my conclusion will be that just as we have a separation of church and state, we also need separation of school and state. Thank you.