Don’t Hand Over Your Children to Be Raised by Your Enemies

Recently, a UK government report was leaked, in which the government’s “education recovery commissioner” lays out proposed changes to be made to the UK schooling system in light of the seemingly waning pandemic. The report stipulates that during the year of the coronavirus, children fell behind in their schooling. Because of that, now they need to catch up in some ways. And the way to do it is to extend the school day by half an hour.

Unsurprisingly, this generated a heated debate on social media. Indeed, some members of the public viewed the proposed change as negative. However, the criticism was far from substantial - it typically came in the form of arguments such as that with a longer day, children will not have the time for their extracurricular activities. Alternatively, it was argued that “kids need the time to be kids” and that a longer school day would partly take that away from them.

In the discussion, bitterly reflective of today’s prevalent public opinions, no one asked whether it was actually good that children should spend more time in school irrespective of their hobbies or personal lives. No one asked whether schooling was a positive thing in and of itself. And no one thought for a second before invoking schooling and education interchangeably.

Despite the very limited public debate regarding state-provided “education”, there is a much more fundamental case against its expansion and even its mere existence.

We live in a strange world today, where, in all countries, most children go to government schools every day. Those are schools either completely owned and operated by governments, or nominally private ones, which nevertheless have to operate according to government edicts. Of course, just as any other company, the government is free to open its schools and operate them. But this is not where it ends. Where such a venture stops being legitimate is the funding. Government schools are “free” for people to attend. Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, though, and so government schools are funded by government funds - in other words, by extorted money.

If this was not an ethical problem in and of itself, the results of this are even more nefarious. Schools funded by extorted money have an unfair advantage. When it comes to a parental choice of whether to send their children to a government school, a privately-run one, or to make other educational arrangements such as homeschooling, these options are not on equal footing. Those parents have already been forced to pay for one regardless of whether they actually end up choosing it or not. This is a glaring example of a playing field that is not at all level, and for many parents and families, having to pay twice is an expense they would understandably rather avoid. It is not surprising that most families would indeed opt to send their children to a government school under such circumstances, especially given the relentless propaganda aimed at portraying any alternatives in the worst possible light.

The situation I just described is what it is like in the UK. And as it turns out, the global situation is so bad that the UK’s arrangement is still one of the best across the world. In UK law, the wording of the provision setting out compulsory education of school-aged children is that there is a “duty of parents to secure education.” Such “duty”, then, can be carried out in several ways, including private schools or homeschooling. Private schools in the UK are still inspected by the government, but luckily, they have been allowed a reasonable measure of leeway in what and how they teach. 

In many other countries, there are no such options, and any alternatives to government schooling might be outright illegal. Or if there are non-governmental schools at all, they still have to follow the same curriculum as government schools, are in no way actually independent, and cannot make any major decisions about teaching content or style.

This is the system that has been spread worldwide under the banner of “free and compulsory education” through states, international organisations, and the NGO class. In it, children are forced to be given up to the arms of the state for many hours every day, to be herded and handled by state representatives there, in often humiliating and abusive ways, all under the threat of being kidnapped from their families if they dared to disobey.

On that threat of violence, the state is then free to rear children in its own image and for its own purposes. Quoted in Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory, Herbert Spencer described what this means more than a century ago:

“For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens.... It must first form for itself a definite conception of a pattern citizen; and, having done this, must elaborate such system of discipline as seems best calculated to produce citizens after that pattern. This system of discipline it is bound to enforce to the uttermost. For if it does otherwise, it allows men to become different from what in its judgment they should become, and therefore fails in that duty it is charged to fulfill.”

As the history of compulsory education clearly shows, the purpose of government schools is nothing else but to mould the population into uniformity, fear, and obedience to whatever regime is in place. For those arguing that the “education” system has since changed and is different today, suffice to say that if the motives were benevolent and the institution beneficial to the public, there would be no need for compulsion in the first place. When the propaganda for a regime spreads wide enough, it becomes so commonplace that people become unable to see it and even recognise its existence. 

Government “education” is a system that locks children up in child prisons designed to break their will and force them to endure a persistent propaganda campaign that lasts for their entire childhoods. “Free and compulsory education” is by far the most widespread systemic human rights violation in the world today and those calling for this system’s expansion are no better than domestic terrorists.

Despite often being wary of some forms of collectivism, many conservatives might actually be enticed by the nationalistic, seemingly patriotic language in the picture painted by Spencer above. They might assert that such a “strong” and “patriotic” national education system is needed for the nation to survive and maintain its vitality. I would urge those conservatives not to get lost in their imagination and remember what the system of compulsory education looks like in real life. In real life, the ones in control of the system are not patriotic, flag-waving conservatives - and never will be - but operatives of the progressivist cathedral, their supposed enemies. In real life, the type of collectivism, uniformity, and obedience the system promotes and creates is very different from the one they themselves favour. In real life, those conservatives need to realise that, since the system is set up against them and there is no scenario in which they could gain the power to achieve anything other than meaningless PR gestures, they are better off advocating for the separation of education and state. That way, they will not be the rulers of the whole machinery, but in contrast to today, neither will their enemies be. 

Given all the above, it is clear that an expansion of the current “education” system, even by half an hour each day, is wrong and evil in and of itself. When the entire government schooling system is rooted in grave injustice, any such expansion must be viciously opposed. By contrast, an already existing movement in the right direction needs to be grown, invigorated, and spurred to action by such audacity of those wannabe tyrants. Separation of education and state needs to be demanded, not proposed, and history will eventually recognise “free and compulsory education” for the atrocity and humanitarian horror it is.