The Education Long Game

It was a hard sell, getting Americans to accept that the government should be in the education game. As Orestes Brownson put it in 1839:

“Where the whole tendency of education is to create obedience, all teachers must be pliant tools of government. Such a system of education is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society but the thing is wholly inadmissible here. According to our theory the people are wiser than the government. Here the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give law to the government. To entrust government with the power of determining education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power of the master. The fundamental difference between the United States and Prussia has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters.”

Had a hard time finding this quotation. Found it here.

It took another 13 years from when Brownson made the above comment, until 1852, for the first compulsory state controlled schooling law to get passed. Education went from something provided and managed by family and church to something ‘provided’ and managed by the state. By now, very few can imagine it any other way: education simply IS what happens in public schools and their private and religious doppelgangers.

Form follows function. The age segregated classrooms, the frequent bells, the standardized test and scores, the ‘certified’ state-trained teachers, the centralized control of the curriculum, the long hours and copious homework, the fracturing of knowledge into ‘subjects’, the exclusion of parents – that is the form of modern education. What is its function? The stated goals of centralized Prussian education as implemented in the early 19th century, the system Mann and many others studied and strove to duplicate here, were:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
2. Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms;
3. Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function;
4. Well-subordinated clerks for industry;
5. Citizens who thought alike on most issues;
6. National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

The huge point, the elephant in the room, the sine qua non of any real education reform: We must destroy the form because it serves the function! We rail against all the evil things being taught in the schools – hatred for our country, racism against people of European descent, transgenderism, radical subjectivism, nihilism, and so on –

It doesn’t matter! it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t teach during classes! What matters is the FORM. Healthy children and healthy families would fight back against nonsensical teaching. Kids with some self-respect, with the unconditional love of their parents, with a place in their neighborhood, church, and family – and the parents that raised them – would not fall for this garbage. BUT – we do!

We do because we are now into our 4th full generation of near-universal compulsory age-segregated graded classroom schooling. Day after day, our kids, in the same way their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, are marched into school and told what group they are a part of. You’re 7? You’re a second grader. Sit down and do as you are told. You’re 12? You are a 7th grader. Sit with these people, do as your told. In 40 minutes, a bell will ring. Stop all thought on whatever topic we may have been on, and start thinking about whatever topic is next. And so on, for hours. Here is homework to make sure you are still doing what you are told when you are not in the classroom. Your parents will be judged on how well they comply and make you do that homework.

Day after day, month after month, year after year – you stay with the people we tell you to stay with, do the work we tell you to do, stop and start your thinking according to a bell schedule we set, take home work we tell you you need to do, and accept the place we assign you according to tests we devise. Your entire self image is to be determined by how well you do in school – how well you comply.

We, the products of this system, this FORM, of schooling, were ready, in the fourth generation, to take the ultimate test: 2+2=5. Boys can be girls. People must be judged by the color of their skin or their accents or whatever else we tell you to judge them by. The only truth is there is no truth, except that if you don’t want to be cast into the outer darkness, you must do what we tell you.

All the woke garbage in the schools? It’s not what is being taught – it is the TEST TO SEE IF YOU HAVE LEARNED WHAT WAS BEING TEAUGHT. Scared, compliant, dependent, herd animals? Who see any who fail to comply as an existential threat? GOOD! Here’s your gold star. Move on to the next class.

This is the beast we’re fighting.

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Some bullet points trying to capture what’s rattling around in my head. What follows assumes we do not descend into total chaos, in which case tar and feathering will be the nicest thing that happens to our ‘educators’. I’d avoid lampposts if I’d been pushing gender ideology, if things get truly bad.

Assuming we have more of a slowfall, a la the outer provinces when Rome fell, the long game to educational sanity:

1. Get the fed and the states entirely out of the education business. No funding, no loans, no ‘programs’, no guidance, no standards, no compulsion or mandates – nada

This would spell the end of much of what drives us crazy about modern secondary education. The only way all those Studies professors and DIE directors get hired is through government funding either directly or through student loans. Once the universities have to compete for dollars in the pockets of their customers, this stuff dies.

2. Education is under the complete control of parents. Keep them home? Send them to a school? Apprentice them? Let them roam feral? Up to mom and dad.

Of course, this will cause massive wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Front Row Kids – their entire self image and sense of worth relied on being the good student. The very idea that people need to DO STUFF other than regurgitate what they’re spoon-fed by teachers, and must develop a sense of self-worth independent of their standing in school terrifies them.

Tough. Sometimes reality sucks. And parents, who have been told that school isn’t just semi-free day care – even though that’s what it is, from a working parent’s point of view – are going to need to come to grips with reality: your kid, you arrange for him to be educated. You’re allegedly an adult – you figure it out.

Any meaningful reform – re-FORM – of education is going to be hated and fought by most people. I know parents who hardly know their own kids. Saying they love them is hoping in the face of no evidence. Getting them to accept that they are responsible for those kids? They are not going to like it, and the Orwellian euphemisms will flow thick.

And, as I’ve long said, the primary victims of schooling are teachers – and the good students. After all that effort completing all the busywork, and sitting up front and taking notes and not complaining, getting all the gold stars and awards and straight A’s – now, none of that matters? Who am I!?!

Many will fight back. I’d expect that, in a free market for education, many will attempt to replicate the public schools – only better! Some of the heavily endowed legacy colleges may attempt to keep going – let them! But also let people try whatever education they think best – their church, their family, their friends, some combination. Me? I’d have probably spent a lot of time in the library and the community center basketball courts (they were conveniently next door to each other in my home town).

This assumption that education is something so difficult and arcane as to require years of expert delivery to have any hope of succeeding – it is to laugh a bitter laugh.

We need to go forth and live. Modern education must die.