gat

Limiting the power of government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American
revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things
aren’t acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just
fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign of regression toward a global mean, hardly
progress by our lights if you’ve seen much of the governance of the rest of the world where
common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue.
Carl Schurz, the German immigrant, said upon seeing America for the first time in 1848, "Here
you can see how slightly a people needs to be governed." What it will take to break collectively
out of this trap is a change in the nature of forced schooling, one which alters the balance of
power between societies and systems in favor of societies again. We need once more to debate
angrily the purpose of public education. The power of elites to set the agenda for public schooling
has to be challenged, an agenda which includes totalitarian labeling of the ordinary population,
unwarranted official prerogatives, and near total control of work. Until such a change happens,
we need to individually withhold excessive allegiance from any and all forms of abstract, remotely
displaced, political and economic leadership; we need to trust ourselves and our children to
remake the future locally, demand that intellectual and character development once again be the
mission of schools; we need to smash the government monopoly over the upbringing of our young
by forcing it to compete for funds whose commitments should rest largely on the judgment of
parents and local associations. Where argument, court action, foot-dragging, and polite
subversion can’t derail this judgment, then we must find the courage to be saboteurs, as the
maquis did in occupied France during WWII.
It isn’t difficult, someone once said, to imagine young Bill Clinton sitting at the feet of his favorite
old professor, Dr. Carroll Quigley of Georgetown. As Quigley approached death, he came back to
Georgetown one last time in 1976 to deliver the Oscar Iden Lecture Series. The Quigley of the
Iden lectures said many things which anticipate the argument of my own book. His words often
turn to the modern predicament, the sense of impending doom many of us feel:
The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of
communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the
resulting neuroses and psychoses...another cause of today’s instability is that
we now have a society....which is totally dominated by the two elements of
sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and
banking, and the corporation. These are free to political controls and social
responsibility, ...The only element of production they are concerned with is the
one they can control: capital.
Quigley alludes to a startling ultimate solution to our problems with school and with much else in
our now state-obsessed lives, a drawing of critical awareness:
...out of the Dark Age that followed the collapse of the Carolingian Empire
came the most magnificent thing...the recognition that people can have a
society without having a state. In other words, this experience wiped out the
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