Our Socialist Schools are like jail....12-yr sentence

Imagine education wholly managed by the market economy. The variety! The choice! The innovation! All the features we’ve come to expect in so many areas of life—groceries, software, clothing, music—would also pertain to education. But, as it is, the market for education is hobbled, truncated, frozen and regimented, and tragically, we’ve all gotten used to it.

The longer people live with educational socialism, the more they adapt to its inefficiencies, deprivations and even indignities. So it is with American public schools. Many people love them, but it’s like the “Stockholm Syndrome”: We’ve come to have a special appreciation for our captors and masters because we see no way out. There is a way out, but first we have to see the problem for what it is.

The government has centrally planned your child’s life and has forced both you and your child into the system. But, the system is a racket and a cheat. It doesn’t prepare them for a life of liberty and productivity. It prepares them to be debt slaves, dependents, bureaucrats and wartime fodder.

There are millions of unemployed young people in Europe and the US. This is what the system has produced. This is the mob that once gathered in “homeroom,” assembled for school lunches, sat for endless hours in their assigned desks and was tested ten thousand times to make sure they had properly absorbed what the government wanted them to know. Now they are out and they want their lives to amount to something, but they don’t know what.

Think of the phrase “twelve-year-sentence.” The government took them in at the age of 6. It sat them down in desks, 30 or so per room. It paid teachers to lecture them and otherwise keep them busy while their parents worked to cough up 40% of their paychecks to the government to fund the system (among other things) that raises their kids.

So it goes for 12 years, until the age of 18, when the government decides that it is time for them to move on to college, where they sit for another four years, also at mom and dad’s expense.

What have they learned? They have learned how to sit at a desk and zone out for hours and hours, five days per week. They might have learned how to repeat back things said by their warden—I mean teacher. They’ve learned how to sneak around the system a bit and have something resembling a life on the sly.

They have learned to live for the weekend and say “TGIF!” Perhaps they have taken a few other skills with them: sports, music, theater or whatever. But they have no idea how to turn their limited knowledge or abilities into something remunerative in a market system that depends most fundamentally on individual initiative, alertness, choice and exchange.

They are deeply ignorant about the stuff that makes the world work and builds civilization, by which I mostly mean commerce. They’ve never worked a day in the private sector (sort of like the Clintons’ & Obama). They’ve never taken an order, never faced the bracing truth of the balance sheet, never taken a risk, and never even managed money. They’ve only been consumers, not producers, and their consumption has been funded by others, either by force (taxes) or by leveraged parents on a guilt trip.

So it stands to reason: They have no sympathy for or understanding of what life is like for the producers of this world. Down with the productive classes! Or as they said in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution: “Expropriate the expropriators” Or under Stalin: “Kill the Kulaks.” Or under Mao: “Eradicate the Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas). So too did the Nazi youth rage against the merchant classes who were said to lack “blood and honor.”

The amazing thing is not that this state system produces mindless drones. The miracle is that some make it out and have normal lives. They educate themselves. They get jobs. They become responsible. Some go on to do great things. There are ways to overcome the twelve-year sentence, but the existence of the educational penitentiary still remains a lost opportunity, coercively imposed.

Americans are taught to love the sentence because it is “free.” Imagine attaching this word to the public school system! It is anything but free. It is compulsory at its very core. If you try to escape, you are “truant.” If you refuse to cough up to support it, you are guilty of evasion. If you put your kids in private school, you pay twice. If you school at home, the social workers watch every move you make.

There is no end to the reform. But no one talks about abolition. Still, can you imagine that in the 18th and most of 19th centuries, this system didn’t even exist? Americans were the most-educated people in the world, approaching near-universal literacy, and without a government-run central plan, without a twelve-year sentence. Compulsory education was unthinkable. That came much later brought to us by the same crowd who gave us World War I, the Fed and the income tax.

Escaping is very hard, but even high-security prisons are not impenetrable. So millions have left. Tens of millions more remain. The whole generations of young people are victims of the system. That makes them no less dangerous precisely because they don’t even know it. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome: Many of these kids fell in love with their captors and jailers. They want them to have even more power.

Jeffrey Tucker

 

LOL Socialist schools.

 

Yea, I can't even dignify this any further. I suppose the next thread is about our Socialist military and their top down structure.

Totally, mindbogglingly, idiotic.

 

I don't know if you know that public schools in USA are from the beginning of the XIX century, and as the number of public schools was increased the rate of literacy was increased. But yeah, ignore that fact. And I imagine that also you know that the public education was installed by the Republicans

 

On balance, publicly financed schools are an idea that used to work.

That said publicly operated schools are now in a state of collapse despite lavish funding.

States pay for roads but private contractors build them. Why not schools.

We'll see shortly. Indiana will implement a much-expanded voucher system shortly.

 

I'm curious to see how that works out.

 

Yeah, schools would become walled gardens the working folks' children couldn't possibly afford to attend.

There would be none of these things. All schools would become for-profit institutions operating upon basically the same principles; keep tuitions high to maximize profits and keep out the poor students, apply exacting educational standards for entry for middle class children, and bar everyone else from receiving an education to increase the value of the product.

Schools that violate that formula would lose money as their profit margins eroded and their performance record suffered.

If I choose to go shopping at the save-a-lot rather than a fresh market I am not condemning my children to a lifetime of poor education and substandard wages.

How the (*)(*)(*)(*) are "state controlled schools" socialist? A socialist school would be one owned by the local parents and teachers; where a share is granted merely for residing near it. State control and socialism cannot coexist--that necessarily puts bureaucrats, not workers or consumers, in control.

The only thing that would do that is socialist education; which you cannot get at either private schools or state-run schools.

 

Evidence please, both of government schools being common (or even existent) prior to the 1850's, and that the prevalence of them coincided with an increase in literacy.

Perhaps you mean the schools organized by private interests that offered inexpensive, effective education? Or do you mean the Catholic schools which also offered inexpensive, effective education? There were "public" schools in that they were open to any member of the public, but they weren't run by government nor were they compulsory institutions with a model created by and enforced by government bureaucrats.

The first compulsory government education laws weren't enacted until 1852 in Massachusetts. At that time, literacy was approaching 98% in that state.

Compulsory government education wasn't nationwide until 1910, around 100 years after the "beginning of the XIX century."

I challenge you to provide *any* evidence that government schools in the US (or the UK) were created into order to make up for a deficiency in literacy or other academic skills. The only evidence you will find is that, in the UK, there was some concern over the resources available to those in extreme rural areas. No one else would have made the argument that you made - that children weren't learning and needed government to step in and provide that for them.

 

Obviously, you went to the 12-year prison of public schools.

But if you look around you, you see the results of Public "Schools", and the credentialist notions that they've created. In 1900, it didn't matter how much "schooling" you had, it mattered what you could do. If you could run a store, you were a shopkeeper, if you could build things, you were a carpenter, if you could do math, you could be an accountant. It didn't take a "degree" it took an education. After 100 years of education, more and more jobs require ever more advanced degrees -- mostly the increase is due to lack of education at lower levels. When everyone could graduate from HS, no one wanted "just a graduate" because what it meant in real terms is that the "graduate" is functionally literate, not that he was ready to enter the workforce. So employers started demanding college as a hedge against the shrinking skills of high school graduates. Now that college is much the same thing, it's starting to go to Masters and PhDs, and i suppose by 2150 we'll be talking about the 35 year sentence in much the same way.

The trouble is that schools run by the government are anti-achievement by nature. What matters to your teacher is not skills (despite testing) but seat-time. You graduate with the same people you started with (barring something so bad that they can't justify it) because you've attended for the same amount of time. Whether you can do the next grade's level of work is largely immaterial to the teacher. You could read at a 6th grade level or be illiterate, but if you're 9, you're in 3rd grade. This leads to a couple of problems. First off, the credentialist credo means that actual learning is discouraged, because if you don't get a diploma, it doesn't really count in the economic world. Which means that if I take a course on Shakespeare, it counts as college, while if I simply read his works at home, it's not really learning. The same mentality holds for other things. If I get an MBA, it's better than 15 years of experience running a business day to day after graduating HS. So rather than trying to learn a skill, you get a credential, because it's more eoconomicly useful to have a certification in a skill than to be able to understand the topic or use the skill.

The other part of the problem is that as the number of "credentials" you need to be functional increase, so does the average age of "maturity" or what I suppose could be called "functional adulthood". What I mean by functional adulthood is the age at which the average American is done with school and is now out in the world and expected to make a living from his education. In 1900, it would have started around 16-17, in 1950 it would have been 18, today it's 23. If you require a MS on top of the BS, you're talking about 25-26. By making the average age of functional adulthood go up, and having people begin life with a deep debt, each year of adulthood between the begininning and end must be that much more productive to stay in place. Imagine starting life as a new PhD in 2150 -- at an average age of 32 -- $500,000 in debt. You have 38 years to build a life, family and nest egg before you hit 70 and retirement. Of course, by this time, you really are too old to have more than a kid or two -- after that, biologically speaking you have a problem of increasing the chances of birth defects if you haven't already had menopause before that. So the ability to have any sort of life post education is diminished -- you just don't have enough time to build your life before you're reaching old age and thinking about stopping work to retire.

 

That is false, until 1870 the literacy in USA was not superior than 80%, and started to be superior from there.

Yeah the public education was introduced by Mann and the Whigs, the Republicans, and everyday more extensive, and thanks to that the literacy was increased in USA. It is false that in XIX century from the beginning had more than 90% of literacy.

But what it is interesting, is that Republicans that now hate the public education in the XIX century were the ones that introduced it.

 

This wasn't a problem prior to the enactment of compulsory government education. Maybe, like the drug war, humans just can't handle freedom like they use to. They've become less intelligent, more dependent, and less capable of sufficiency. At least, that is the implication of the modern progressive argument.

Ridiculous. Not all private schools today are for-profit entitities. Why would they suddenly all become for-profit and attempt to maximize profit? I work with several educational institutions that are non-profit and keep their prices very low. They cater to children as well as adults. They not only operate in an environment where they must defeat competition, they do it so well and at such low price points that there is virtually no competition in their areas.

It's a terrible idea that parents would have a choice in the matter of education for their children, and might know better than bureaucrats as to what their children need and from what model they might benefit in terms of education. The Federal one-size-fits-all model is what is best, and for those that struggle with it there are plenty of answers from Big Pharma Congressional contributors.

No. Sending them to a government school where they are indoctrinated in the idea of the infallible authority of the state and it's collaberators just condemns them to a lifetime of dependency, an inability to think critically, indebtedness to banks, an entitlement mentality, and perhaps, a shorter lifetime as willing, patriotic cannon fodder for the war machine.

They are progressive, not necessarily socialist. They have always been progressive, which is a form of collectivism. Socialism is also a form of collectivism. Socialism cannot exist without a state because it cannot account for a lack of economic calculation unless there are central planners with the same powers that a modern state has to incarcerate, punish, and even kill. Progressivism suffers the same economic calculation issues, but it does not outwardly reject the state but instead exalts it.

 

Depends on the region of the country. There was a massive emphasis on public education in the northeast after the Revolution, continuing until primary education was established as a right for all children in those states. Those schools were mostly publicly funded schools.

The South didn't really get a kick in the pants until the late 19th century.

No, they were probably referring to the quite ubiquitous public primary school found in the late 18th century American northeast. And literacy rates in the US were extremely high even compared to Europe because of it.

Public education in Massachusetts was around long before 1852. The literacy rate was so very high precisely because they had extensive public education programs in that state--and region of the country.

 

It was, however, a significant problem until public schools were established. You're falsely associating that with "compulsory". Merely having publicly funded schools is usually sufficient to convince people to go unless they're so badly off they're forcing their children to work--which isn't allowed in the US anyway.

No it's not.

The for-profit schools would crowd-out the not-for-profit schools. They would have more capital available, and a huge incentive to put the not-for-profit schools "out of business" through anti-competitive tactics that the presumably hands-off government wouldn't prevent.

Who said anything about "sudden"? When you're evaluating policy, you need to keep a mind towards long-term consequences in addition to short-term consequences. For a time I'm sure there would be plenty of not-for-profit schools. But there wouldn't be much growth of not-for-profit education, and it would eventually get crowded out of the market as a serious option for most parents.

Which would be a condition suddenly turned on its head by the introduction of market-driven education. They would lose their niche and wouldn't be able to afford to expand.

My objection was primarily the description of government-controlled education as "socialist", which is about returning power to the people, not concentrating it with government planners.

Private education is not an answer to this problem any more than federally-managed schools are.

 

In the north it was closer to 90% prior to 1850. In 1991 Massachusetts, literacy was 91%. In 1850 Massachusetts, it was 98%. The fact that the antebellum south suffered a "low" literacy rate of 80% is still amazing, considering that until 1865, a significant portion of it's population was not allowed education by force of law. It can hardly be argued that government education changed literacy rates in the south, unless you want to argue that black people could not possibly learn to read except by government beneficence.

That people needed to learn to read due to rapid industrialization is obvious. Your argument that government needed to provide schools because people weren't going to learn to read, otherwise, is unsupportable. It wasn't even the argument made by proponents of government education, which is why you refuse to provide any evidence of your assertion.

Today, functional illiteracy is at it's highest ever. While 90-95% of adults can read, only 75% of them can actually understand what they are reading. Almost 25% of adult Americans can barely interpret an advertisement in a newspaper.

Yeah, that's some progress for government education!

So, you argue that without government education, literacy would not have increased? On what basis do you make this argument?

Please show me where Horace Mann ever claimed that without government intervention, the children in his state (Massachusetts) would suffer academically?

Are you aware that when the laws he advocated for were enacted, the military had to be called out to force children into government schools? I still find it difficult to believe that you are an anarchist, since you always argue on behalf of the infallibility of government authority.

Unintended consequences of enhancing the power of the state? Never!

 

There is a very simple solution to improving competition among schools, public and private. Governments should simply make all levels of public schooling tuition based rather than property taxed based. This provides the school choice that many people want. Instead of sending your children to a local public school, one can decide among many public school districts where to send one's children. This also provides the ability for a parent to be able to pay for private school, if they so desire, and can do so without having to send money that may go towards your child's education to municipal governments.

 

next republicans will be claiming they want the government to give every child a 10k voucher every year to go to the school of their choice

sorry folks, if you choose another school, you get a tax credit for what you put in, not 10k

the 10k is part of the cost of the school, taking away 10k from the education fund would be disasterour

 

A voucher system is simply the wrong approach. If you want to provide complete choice and competition between public and private schools on all levels, you have to make the education sector completely tuition based. Vouchers simply serve as an added cost to the government, which then leads to either increased property taxes or increased tuition.

 

LOL. However it is true that the functional illiteracy is really high, is enough to see the people that is in the American parliament. They are functionally illiterates, mainly in Internet.

And I don't know from where do you get that info. My sources and my textbooks always talk about the 80% from 1870.

No, I am arguing that without universal education there is no increasing literacy, and the ones that have given this is the state. Because the universal education have some features, and the free market cannot give.

If you reintroduce the education in free market you will have that many people will be out of the system because they cannot afford it. That is basic logic.

Yes Mann argumented that with public education he would create good republicans and civilized people, or something like that. In other words that he will bring literacy to everybody, that is included on the ideas of civilized people.

I am anarchist and I don't like government, but I like less the capitalism(I am anti-capitalist). However we are argumenting in a statist environment, I am not defending even my ideas, or not at all.

If you want to theorize about what I think that is better, then we can discuss this in other topic or in another comment of this thread.

I may ask you one thing, and don't feel offended by this, I am not pretending to despreciate your arguments, just is because you will have more contact with the education or not.

Do you have children or do you have close contact with someone that is studying in primary and/or secondary school?

- The students must memorize many dates, info?
- The students have debates between different topics?
- The students must do presentations of a topic in different subjects?
- The students must write essays about a topic and argument why is holding X position?
- The lections are more lecture type, or are interactive with participation of the student.
- The class has a lot of students(more than 30) or are a few(from 10 or less to max 25)

I am curious to know how it works.

 

Which government funded public schools existed prior to the 1850's? There weren't many, if any. Those that did exist were community funded, not funded by state or federal government, and did not subsist entirely by government funds.

One can't help but consider that as the implication of your argument. If poor parents were able to secure education for their children prior to 1910 such that literacy rates were higher than they are today (including functional literacy rate), why would you claim that they would not secure those educational resources today? What is the missing component in the market provision of education? If anything it ought to be far easier to mass market quality education through our advanced communications systems. In an 1850's rural community, you likely had one or two schoolhouses and, if lucky, two teachers. Today the options are nearly limitless, yet you argue that children would be worse off because of some incapability of their parents that seems to have sprung into existence only in these modern times.

How would they do that? In most markets, it's exactly the opposite. What makes it likely in the education market?

How does a "hands-off" government prevent anti-competitive measures? Perhaps it might mean offering lower prices for better quality? That would be terrible. Still, I'm not convinced. In most cases, a prevalence of non-profit resources usually drives for-profit firms to look for higher margin customers rather than compete directly.

If anyone crowds out non-profits, it's typically government. Whether that be through regulations that create expensive bureaucracies which non-profits can't afford to keep, or by direct competition (e.g. government schools which crowded out inexpensive common schools.)

Can you name a market where this has happened? Even if it is the case, why would you argue that consumers, seeing the benefit of profit versus non-profit, would be worse off? Is it some moral argument that you have against the very idea of people earning a return on risk-taking activities that results in satisfied consumers? Or, maybe it's going back to my initial critique of your arguments. You imply that there is something wrong in parents that they can't properly evaluate what is good for their children and choosing a profitable institution as a means of education is a moral, social, and perhaps economic wrong that can only be rectified by compulsory education in government institutions.

Why would they need to expand? A small school that adopts an open source educational model and provides that to any buyers who pay what they can in time and money, and solicits money from local individuals, businesses and perhaps other sponsors does not necessarily need to expand.

There is no power to the people under socialism. That's a myth. It takes economic calculation away from the individual and puts it in the hands of central planners.

I'm all for public education, so long as it's not run by government. Here's an example of open source, fully accessible, no restrictions (except to those without any access to a computer) public education: http://www.khanacademy.org/

Granted, it's not a "space" where children can go to socialize and learn together, but it's also not a space where children must learn exactly what is provided in their lesson plans; where they are taught to, obey, without question, their teachers, principals and eventually state officials; where they are forced into restricted age groups; and where they are graded like meat.

 

Finland has the top performing students in the world. They have probably the most socialist schooling system in the world. There is no market competition.

 

To be honest, there is nothing wrong with a public education system run by government if they simply open the system up to basic market forces. For example, if you make public schooling tuition based rather than property taxed based. Public schooling no longer becomes highly authoritative. One can then allow teachers themselves, not the government, to create curriculums. By doing so, you create a system where the brightest minds teach students, and parents have full choice over where to send their kids.

 

"But, the system is a racket and a cheat. It doesn’t prepare them for a life of liberty and productivity. It prepares them to be debt slaves, dependents, bureaucrats and wartime fodder."

Just because you turned out that way isn't the fault of public education. It's probably bad parenting, combined with a diminished intellect on your part.

 

They impose tougher standards for teachers, and they have a better education platform that encourages critical thinking and innovation rather than focusing on test-taking and highly regimented curriculums. Different systems work better for different nations.

 

Yeah. Also the next best system are socialist. It is curious how all the top except Korea, that is based in hard working(it is a lot of hours of studying to get similar results to Finland, for example), are public.

The problem that many does not understand is that the public system you can implement it by many ways. More rigid or much more flexible. The Finnish one is really flexible.

 

Yes. Thank you for your excellent post. There is one slight problem however...