gat

compelling public concern. Actually, the enforced long-term segregation of children from the
working world does them great damage, and the general body of men and women certified by the
State as fit to teach is nearly the least fit occupational body in the entire economy if college
performance is the standard.
5) Coercion in the name of education is a valid use of State power: compelling assemblies of
children into specified groupings for prescribed intervals and sequences with appointed overseers
does not interfere with academic learning. Were you born yesterday? Plato said, "Nothing of value
to the individual happens by coercion."
6) Children will inevitably grow apart from their parents in belief, and this process must be
encouraged by diluting parental influence and disabusing children of the idea their parents are
sovereign in mind or morality. That prescription alone has been enough to cripple the American
family. The effects of forced disloyalty on family are hideously destructive, removing the only
certain support the growing spirit has to refer to. In place of family the school offers phantoms
like "ambition," "advancement," and "fun," nightmare harbingers of the hollow life ahead.
7) An overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parents. No wonder G.
Stanley Hall, the father of school administration, invited Sigmund Freud to the United States in
1909—it was urgent business to establish a "scientific" basis upon which to justify the anti-family
stance of State schooling, and the programmatic State in general.
8) It is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education of its own
children, although it is appropriate to sacrifice for the general education of everyone in the hands
of State experts. This is the standard formula for all forms of socialism and the universal
foundation of utopian promises.
9) The State is the proper parent and has predominant responsibility for training, morals, and
beliefs. This is the parens patriae doctrine of Louis XIV, king of France, a tale unsuited to a
republic.
Nuts And Bolts
Let me end this book, my testament, with a warning: only the fresh air from millions upon millions
of freely made choices will create the educational climate we need to realize a better destiny. No
team of experts can possibly possess the wisdom to impose a successful solution to the problem
inherent in a philosophy of centralized social management; solutions that endure are always local,
always personal. Universal prescriptions are the problem of modern schooling, academic research
which pursues the will-o-the-wisp of average children and average stages of development makes
for destructive social policy, it is a sea anchor dragging against advancement, creating the
problems it begs for money to solve. But here is a warning: should we ever agree to honor the
singularity of children which forced schooling contravenes, if we ever agree to set the minds of
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