The entire process of growing up, or developing all the facets of a man's personality, is his education. The term "education" is not limited to a person's formal schooling. He is learning all the time, in every activity of childhood. He learns and forms ideas about the world and the natural laws that govern it. He gains understanding of other people, their desires, and how they achieve them, as well as his own desires and how they are to be achieved. He formulates ideas on the nature of man and what his own and others' ends should be in the light of this nature. This is a continual process, and formal schooling constitutes only a portion of it. In a fundemental sense, everyone is self-educated.

For a large segment of his general education, the child needs no systematic, formal instruction.

More than any other species, individual men are distinct and separate individuals. Despite similarities in ends and values, despite mutual influences, human individuals tend to express their own particular personalities. With the development of civilization, or individual diversity there is less and less uniformity and less "equality." Enthusiasm for equality should actually be viewed as anti-human. It represses the flowering of individual personality and diversity and, indeed of civilization itself. It is, in fact, a reversion toward "savage uniformity".

Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, an effort to make people equal in all or most respects necessarily represents a levelling downward. Since it negates the fundemental principles of human life and human growth, the creed of equality and uniformity leads only to stagnation and eventual decay.

Each individual should have the freest possible scope for the development of his faculties and personality. In order to have this scope, he must have the freedom from coersion which necessarily represses and destroys human growth and endevor. An atmosphere of coersion is far from being conducive to reason and creativity.

The best type of formal instruction for him is that which suits his own particular individuality. The ideal learning situation is individual instruction while the formal school, characterized by classes in which one teacher instructs many children is immensely inferior. Such classroom experiences tend to encourage uniformity rather than develop each individual's maximum potential.

Whatever educational standards are imposed from the outside, injustice is done to all. The worst injury of all comes when parents do not teach their own children. No one is as qualified as the parents to know how much of at what pace the child should be taught and what are his requirements for freedom and guideance. If parents elect not to teach their own children then the question of who should teach the child, and how, is best determined under the overall supervision of the parents directly.

Diversity is not possible where the government prescribes the curriculum, class size, and other details of school operation. Imposition of uniform standards does grave disservice to the diversity of human tastes and abilities.

The state's compulsory schooling laws prevent the education of the child by the people who in many instances are best qualified -- his parents.

Compeling children to go to school for decade of their lives and attend classes - seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year -- in which they may have no interest or no aptitude will only serve to warp their personalities.

The key issue here is simply this: Shall the parent or the state be the overseer of the child?

The question is: Under whose guidance, under whose virtual "ownership", should the child be placed -- his parents or the state? There is no middle ground in this issue. The natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. They are bound to the child with ties of love as well as responsibility. The alternative is virtual "ownership" by the state. The rights of the parents are violated or abdicated, their own child subjected to the will of strangers. The rights of the child are violated as he grows up subjected to the unloving hands of the state which has little or no regard for his individual personality.

Freedom from violence and coercion is essential to the growth of man's reason and personality, this freedom is denied and never "encouraged" by the state's coercive compulsory schooling laws. The feature which distinguishes the state from other established institutions is that the state has the only (legal) power to use violence, to act arbitrarily and forcefully against its citizens. The very existence of such coercive restrictions means that the state-educated child grows up in an atmosphere which frustrates reason and creativity. By imposing uniformity on the teaching of its charges, the state begins the process of supplanting individual will with the will of the group, the collective conscience, the majority force. The majority is represented institutionally by the state and its leaders. What we have is only "the vision of the annointed". Tyranny is not the natural state for the free spirit of man. Tyranny must be learned, while in the state's vision diversity, spontaneity, and independence must be eradicated. This is the logical, inevitable result of the introducation of statist control into the field of education.

Shall there be a free society with parental control of the child's education, or an authoritarian society with state-controlled education?

America began for the most part with a system of completely private philanthropic, public (yet voluntary) schools. In the nineteeth century the concept of public education changed subtly, everyone was urged to go to public schools and the private institutions were accused of being divisive. Finally the individual states imposed compulsory attendance, thereby forcing children into public schools and setting up arbitrary standards for private schools. This downgraded parental instruction, the state had declared war with parents over the control of their children.

There has been a growth of passion for equality in general, with every child regarded as equal to every other child, as deserving of equal treatment. This goal is acheived by imposing complete uniformity in the classroom. It is obvious that where the state controls education it increasingly promotes repression and hinderance of education, rather than the true development of the individual.

The drift toward compulsion and enforced equality at the lowest level has weakened the curriculm and inculcated obidience to the "group" rather than the development of individual independence.

The effect of these policies is to repress the development of reasoning powers and individual independence, to usurp the various educational functions of the home and friends and to mold the child in desired forms.

This forces equality of learning at the level of the least educable and usurps the general educational role of parents and other environmental factors.

Another powerful argument against compulsory education concerns parental control over the child's associates. In the public school will be found most of the other children who would not be there were it not for the compulsory attendance law. This includes subnormal, uneducable children and various types of juvenille delinquents and hoodlums. Parents would not volutarily choose to have their children associate with these types but is forced by the state to do so.

True to the popular attitude which abhors individual superiority and distinction, the passion for levelling and enforced equality proclaims: This is good, let every child be forced to learn about "life" and be forced to associate with "all types of humanity".

Reverend George Harris:

The opportunity is not merely open; it is forced upon all. Even under a socialistic programme it is difficult to imagine any arrangement for providing the education with is all supposed to be more nearly equal that the existing system of public schools.

Indeed, the more nearly equal the opportunity outwardly, the more unequal it is really.

Herbert Read

Mankind is naturally differentiated into many types, and to press all these types into the same mould must inevitably lead to distortions and repressions.

To divide and segregate is not the same as to join and aggregate it is just the opposite process. The whole structure of education as the natural process we have esvisaged, falls to pieces if we attempt to make that structure...artificial.

(The Education of Free Men (London 1944) pp 27-38.)

Mrs. Isabel Paterson

The most exact and demonstrable scientific knowledge will certainly be objectionable to political authority at some point, because it will expose the folly of such authority and its vicious effects.

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings or the "will of the people" in "democracy". Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the tolitarian state.

By enforceing minimum standards, the state effectively, though subtly dominated the private schools and makes them effective extensions of teh public school system. Only removal of compulsory schooling and enforced standards will free the private schools and permit them to function truly independently.

Mrs. Isabel Paterson

But would some children not remain illiterate? They might, as some do now, and as they did in the past. The United States has had one president who did not learn to read and write until after he was not only a grown man but married and earning his own living.

Further education in civilization cannot be obtained at all under full political control of the schools. It is only possible to a certain frame of mind in which knowledge is pursued voluntarily.

Her answer to teachers and educators who reply in epithets to the above criticism:

Do you think anybody would willingly entrust his children to you to pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to collect your pupils by compulsion?

When you think of compulsory schooling -- consider this: What would you think of a proposal that the government use taxpayer dollars to set up a statewide chain of public newspapers and compel all people or children to read them? What if they also outlawed all other newspapers or permitted only those that adhered to their "adequate standards" set by a government board or commission?

As you know it would be regarded with horror and yet this is exactly the sort of coersive system that the government has and is trying to exert more control over with regards to educational and scholastic instruction in New Hampshire.

Compulsory public presses would be considered an invasion of the basic freedom of the press, but scholastic freedom is not thought to be as vital. It is interesting that both are vital mediums for public information and educationi and the latter has a longer lasting impact than the first. Suppression of free instruction should be regarded with even greatere horror than the suppression of a free press because here the unformed minds of our future generations are involved.

Professor E.G. West offers another analogy:

Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. However it is difficult to envisage that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards for "adequate" food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating. It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestioningly accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that "for administrative reasons" parents were only allocated those shops which happened to be nearest their homes.

As strange as this hypothetical measure may appear when applied to food and clothing it is nevertheless typical of state edeucation as it has evolved by historical accident or administrative expediency.

Compulsory Education in Europe

The historical development of compulsory education is a record of state usurpation of parental control over children; the inculcation of the ideals of authoritarian rule and obedience to the state; the imposition of uniformity and equality in retarding individual growth; and the repression of reasoning power and independent thought among our children.

In Athens, the original practice of compulsory state education later gave way to a voluntary system. In Sparta, and acient model for modern tolitarianism they realized the logical, inevitable end result of a compulsory education system. In Plato's "Utopia" the "Big Lie" was considered a proper instrument for the state to use in its indoctrination of the people.

Those who do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it...I guess you never learned.

The first modern movement for compulsory state education stemmed directly from the Reformation. The fundemental principle was that the Bible was the sole guide in all things. There was no salvation outside the Luthern Church and it was not only the duty of the state to compel all to be Lutherans, but the state's sole object.

Lord Action:

The defense of religion became not only the duty of civil power, but the object of its institution. Its business was solely the coercion of those who were out of the Lutheran Church.

Such was the goal of the primary force behind the first compulsory state- school system in the Western World.

Melanchthon taught that all sects must be put down with the sword and that any individual who originated new religious opinions should be punished with death. The Lutheran influence, as you can see, on the political and educational life of the west has been enormous.

The other leading influence toward the establishment of compulsory education was John Calvin. The spirit that animated Calvin's establishment of the state school system was the inculcation of the message of Calvinism and obedience to the theocratic despotism that he established in Geneva. To Calvin, nothing mattered, no liberty or right was important, except his doctrine and its supremacy. Calvin was also adamant in asserting the people's duty to obey their rulers regardless of the form of government.

One of the most far reaching effects of the Calvinist tradition was its influence on American educational history. The Calvinist strain was strong among the immigrating English Puritans, and it was the Puritan influence that inaugurated public schooling and compulsory education in New England.

Prussia -- "State interference in education was almost coincident with the rise of the Prussian State." Under King Frederick William III the absolute state was greatly strengthened, but nowhere more so than education. His famous minister, von Stein, abolished semi-religious private schools and placed all education directly under the Minister of the Interior. In 1810 the ministry decreed state examination and certification of all teachers. In 1812 the graduation examination was revived as a requirement before the student could depart from the state school, and an elaborate system of bureaucrats was established to supervise the schools in the country and towns. Frederick William III strengthened the compulsory state school system more in 1834 by making it necessary for young entrants into the learned professions, as well as all candidates for the civil service and for university studies, to pass the high school graduation exams. In this way, "the state" had effective and complete control over the coming generation of scholors and professionals.

This despotic Prussian system served as a model for the leading professional educationalists and public school advocates in the United States.

Universal compulsory education, like compulsory military service, was ushered into France by the French Revolution in 1791. With the Restoration the Napoleonic system was largely dismantaled with Complete liberty for private schools restored in 1850. French education remained FREE until the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Ferry sponsored a series of laws in 1881 and 1882 which made French education compulsory. Ferry additionally, abolished many other schools which had not been "formally authorized" by the state, and fobade them to conduct schools. The effect of the new regime was to dominate the private schools completely. They were not allowed to be established without a license (permission) and could be closed down by a "simple order"

China has carried out the idea of compulsory education to its logical completion:

The government publishes a list of which may be read; and considering obedience the supreme virtue, authorizes such only as are friendly to despotism. Fearing the unsettling effects of innovation, it allows nothing to be taught but what proceeds from itself. To the end of producing pattern citizens, it exerts a stringent disipline over all conduct. There are "rules for sitting, standing, walking, and bowing, laid down with the greatest precision.

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