NHEG-Magazine-September-October

www.NewHeightsEducation.org
www.NewHeightsEducation.org
Parents can help to control these costs by being more discerning about various college expenses.
Apprenticeship programs offer an alternative to college by providing a signaling mechanism for potential employers that goes
beyond a degree or credential. And more big companies like Apple, Google, and Netflix no longer list a college degree as a
requirement to get hired for certain high-paying jobs.
College costs are rising for a variety of reasons, including more bureaucratic indulgences and more government regulations,
and student loan debt is ballooning. Parents can help to control these costs by being more discerning about various college
offerings and expenses, guiding their child to consider leaner or more innovative higher education programs, and suggesting
college majors that will most likely enable that college investment to pay off with the least debt.
Moreover, parents as taxpayers can hold off on supporting more public funding for higher education—at least until they see if
their tax dollars are actually going toward a more educated citizenry and not some college bureaucrat’s six-figure salary.
The History and
Results of America’s
Disastrous Public
School System, Part I
Source: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
https://fee.org/
The earliest ancestor to our system of
government-mandated schooling comes
from 16th-century Germany.
By Mike Margeson - Justin Spears
Monday, May 13, 2019
While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally
prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with
better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea.
The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools,
multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most
recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer
to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.
Schooling Monopoly
The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education
Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling),
and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is basically one accepted way to educate
kids today: school them.
Given the relatively poor performance of American students on international achievement tests, you would think schooling
might receive a second look. Quite the opposite, actually. It is instead made mandatory, and taxpayers are forced to subsidize
it. This begs the question: Why would the government continue to propagate a system that produces such questionable
results? The answer lies in their motives, and their motives are best understood by reviewing a brief history of compulsory
schooling.
Roots in Germany
The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany. Martin Luther
was a fierce advocate for state-mandated public schooling, not because he wanted kids to become educated, but because he
wanted them to become educated in the ways of Lutheranism. Luther was resourceful and understood the power of the state
in his quest to reform Jews, Catholics, and other non-believers. No less significant was fellow reformist John Calvin, who also
advocated heavily for forced schooling. Calvin was particularly influential among the later Puritans of New England (Rothbard,
1979).
Considering compulsory schooling has such deep roots in Germany, it should be no surprise that the precursor to our
American government school system came directly from the German state of Prussia. In 1807, fresh off a humiliating defeat
by the French during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Germans instituted a series of vast, sweeping societal reforms. Key
within this movement was education reform, and one of the most influential educational reformers in Germany at the time
was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Like Luther before him, Fichte saw compulsory schooling as a tool to indoctrinate
kids, not educate them. Fichte describes his aim for Germany’s “new education” this way:
100 100 NHEG | GENiUS Magazine MAGAZINE | September | www.geniusmag.com
- October 2019
Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance
upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.
September - October 2019 | NHEG Magazine 101