By James Ostrowski
Ludwig von Mises Institue
October 2001


The single greatest obstacle to creating a free society is
government's control over education. Government dictates that
children attend a school, and taxpayers pay enormous sums to
subsidize "free" government schools. The frightening result is that
the vast majority of citizens--nearly 90 percent--end up sending
their children to government-subsidized schools.

The government school monopoly strengthens the state and harms the
cause of liberty in many ways. On the state and local levels,
education accounts for an enormous percentage of expenditures. It is
absurd to suggest, as most Republican candidates do, that they will
cut the size of state government but not touch the school system.
Federal expenditures on education are still relatively small, but
wait five minutes: the foot is in the door.

Next comes the complex web of educational special interest groups:
teachers and their unions, suppliers, publishers, administrators,
and even parents who get a free babysitting service. Three million
government schoolteachers form a powerful army for statism. Since
every subsidy is an argument for every other subsidy, the education
lobby rolls logs with the best of them. They support not only the
cause of ever-greater expenditures on education, but also the entire
statist program of endlessly creative wealth redistribution and the
ever-increasing bureaucratization and regulation of society.

Most importantly, public schools allow government to determine the
political ideas that children are allowed to learn about.

Libertarians are always struck by the consistently statist
perspective exhibited by the vast majority of government school
inmates and parolees. These students just "know" that we needed the
Constitution because the nation was in chaos, FDR saved us from the
Great Depression, and TR saved us from the "robber barons."

Such ideas and more and worse are inculcated in young minds when
they are soft and malleable. They gradually harden like concrete
long before any of our libertarian institutions can supply an
antidote. Is it not the case that most lovers of liberty formed
their views as teenagers or young adults? I personally do not know a
single person who became a libertarian after age thirty. You have to
get them while they're young or forget them. Presently, that task is impossible.

The present ban on religion in government schools aids the statist
viewpoint. As all totalitarian regimes know, religions posit a
scheme of values prior to and superior to the state. It is not the
case, however, that no religion is taught in government schools. If
religion is broadly defined to include even "one's ultimate
concern," it becomes obvious that the religion taught in government
schools is that interventionist government is the ultimate human
value. Government schools forbid the teaching of any religion but state worship.

Government schools introduce and reinforce the bureaucratic
mentality, the opposite of a free and spontaneous attitude toward
life. To the bureaucratic mind, life is about unthinking adherence
to a set of arbitrary rules of behavior established by superiors in
a chain of command. No heavy thinking is required; just follow
orders. By their very nature, such rules do not differentiate
between individuals, but treat all as a mass. Twelve years of
habituation to such a mode of living generally inoculates students
from resistance to the bureaucratic state they will be suffering
under for the remainder of their lives.

Though many government school products survive the experience with
their minds intact, many hundreds of thousands emerge ill-equipped,
intellectually or morally, to function independently in today's
world. These misfits fill out the ranks of petty criminals, welfare
recipients, drug users, and beggars of one form or another.
Naturally, the existence of such folk leads to calls for more social
service programs, police, prisons, and more spending on education!
In this way, government creates its own demand, as the failure of
one government program provides the impetus for the next one.

It is therefore no exaggeration to state that government control
over education is the ultimate foundation of statism today. No
substantial progress for liberty will occur unless this foundation
is cracked. How do we go about this? Our only choices are to revolt,
reform, or withdraw. Leaving revolt to a far corner of our minds for
the time being, we are left with reform or withdrawal.

Can government schools be reformed? No. The only viable reform
option on the table is vouchers. As Lew Rockwell took the lead in
pointing out, vouchers do not move us in the direction of a free
market in education. Rather, they constitute a form of educational
socialism for the middle class. They provide an excuse for the total
regulation of private schools as a condition of funding. "Whose
bread I eat, his song I must sing."

Beyond the weakness of the leading proposal for reform, there is the
sheer impossibility of defeating the education lobby in the
political arena. These special interests simply care more about
stopping reform than the reformers do about enacting it. They have
more bodies prepared to spend more money, time, and energy. They
vote early and often. The laws of rational apathy and rational
ignorance protect the present system as they protect all other
aspects of the statist system. Reform will not be enacted, and even
if it is, it will increase, not decrease, the size and power of government.

Private schools, in the short run, are not the answer. There are too
few of them. Those close by tend to be too secular or too religious
or the wrong religion, depending on one's point of view. Further,
millions of parents, already taxed to death to support public
schools, cannot presently afford expensive private schools.

Which leaves only one alternative; withdrawal. This is commonly
referred to as home schooling. The spontaneous growth of the
home-schooling movement with close to two million students has begun
to capture public attention. I am not prepared to say that home
schooling is the ideal form of education for everyone. I am prepared
to say with certainty that it is the only political strategy that
can destroy the public school monster.

Let's make the first day of government school a national day of home
schooling. Imagine the embarrassment for the educational
establishment if the classrooms were empty on the first day of
school. Suppose they gave a bad education and nobody came? In our
government-school-induced, semi-literate culture, that picture would
be worth a thousand words.

James Ostrowski is an attorney in Buffalo, New York. Further Reading: Murray N. Rothbard,
Education: Free and Compulsory (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1999).