22A047 What Schools Do by Jim Davies, 11/22/2022

A few times in this Blog (eg here) I've offered a qualified recommendation of the high-quality, short videos put out by Prager U, the conservative group. Some of them, expecially those about race, are excellent. Others are poor, and one recent one about the military was dreadful. So, discriminate!

Right after the November 8th election, PU put out an analysis of how young people had voted, in each of the 50 states. Here's their map. I agree, it's very alarming; not just that all in that group voted Democrat, but that they all did so in lockstep.

If a population is thinking at all, there will be some variation in view. The majority of young people in a few states, at least, would have voted Red. But it didn't happen, according to the counters.

Therefore, that population is not thinking.

The reason isn't hard to see; all members of that subset are recent graduates of the government school monopoly, or of a college whose professors are almost all government junkies - and often, Marxist - and in both cases were trained by government and are paid by government; and he who pays the piper, calls the tune. So it's no wonder at all that they emerge from all that indoctrination as socialist statists to one degree or another. Fortunately, as the graduates experience real life for the first time, very many of them later repudiate a good deal of that nonsense.

Now, while there is only a tiny difference between the two big parties in the US, their rhetoric suggests that Democrats see no problem that more government cannot solve, while Republicans proclaim they favor only a small government. Once in power, the two of them do very much the same things, so neither is worth the time of day. But how come school graduates emerge heavily biased toward the ever-bigger-government view, as blue as blue can be?

Tax-funded, government-directed schooling was not invented to help kids learn and reason for themselves, but to instil in them the habits of obedience to and respect for the state. That was King Fred's whole purpose, back in Prussia in 1812, when he fashioned the model that was copied worldwide during the 19th Century and which has poisoned the minds of every succeeding generation. Unfortunately, it has worked. Schools are not the miserable failures PU and other Conservative critics claim they are: they are doing exactly what they were intended to do.

In his seminal book Is Public Education Necessary? the late Samuel Blumenfeld quotes (ch. 8) Victor Cousin, one of the movers & shakers who brought the Prussian system to America. Cousin reported that it had, by 1833,

"...full state financial support via taxation, compulsory attendance, truant oficers, punishments for recalicrant parents, graded classrooms, uniform curriculum, and teachers trained by the State."

What more could be desired, by the heart of any statist indoctrinator? PU's map is a picture of how fully the scheme has succeeded.

While Conservative critics are vocal in their demands for improvement, I know of none of them who are calling for abolition of government schools; they just want to see a more wholesome curriculum, leaving financing (and so, control) where it is. Only libertarians and anarchists wish to end the monopoly and let the market offer such schooling as parents may wish to buy.

When that's been done, in the coming zero government society, the map will no longer be blue, and won't have much red either (actually it will all be white, since there won't be anyone to vote for.) There will be shades of opinion, sure; but on one thing all will agree; education is about helping kids think for themselves. What a radical idea.