Government Education; L. W. Reed

Let's get something straight before we go any further. To note that government rests on the use of force is not some radical anarchist idea. It is the very definition of the institution and its ultimate distinguishing feature. For much of the last half millennium, political scientists of virtually every stripe accepted the notion as fact. No respectable scholar tried to paper it over and pass· government off as some kind of voluntary, benevolent society. America's founders understood this princi ple well and crafted a regime that never pur ported to eliminate force; they only sought to restrict it to a narrow sphere of life and there by preserve a large measure of individual lib erty. Perhaps George Washington said it best when he purportedly observed, "Government is not reason. It is not eloquence-it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fear ful master." In other words, even when gov ernment does no more than what Washington wanted it to do, and when it does those few Lawrence Reed is president 0/ the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (www.mackinac.org), afree market research and educational organization in Midland, Michigan, and chairman o/FEE's Board o/Trustees.

13 things very well as a "servant" of the people, it's still dangerous because behind it all is the employment of legalized force. The Yellow Light A deeply rooted understanding of this inherent character of government is a pillar of the free society. It's the yellow caution light that prompts wise and peaceful citizens to deliberate long and hard before accepting an expansion of government duties. It creates a healthy skepticism about seductive schemes to supplant private initiative with public action. It discourages attempts to impose a collective conformity at the expense of the individual. If you are an advocate of the free society today, you surely have noticed an erosion in the understanding of this principle. It may not be an exaggeration to assert that the erosion has been massive and far more deleterious to our liberty and well-being than all but a few ever imagined. This point struck me hard recently when I read a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.

The letter writer was responding to a previ ously published commentary by a man who had argued that Ernest Hemingway opposed government funding of the arts because he felt that artists should be independent of polit ical influence. She took issue with the com mentator on the grounds that Hemingway "did accept money from benefactors." Accepting money freely given by patrons, in the mind of the letter writer, was indistin14 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • DECEMBER 1999 guishable from accepting money from the government. Similarly, I have witnessed countless occa sions when individuals argued that if govern ment does something and is well intentioned, it couldn't possibly be coercive; or, that if it's "democratic," it's somehow voluntary. The mere fact that politicians are elected validates almost whatever they do as nothing more than consensual acts between altruistic adults. A much more sober and rational view of the lim itations of a democratic republic, preferable though it is to any other form of government, is the one that describes it as two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

So it is that we've arrived at the point described by Edgar Freidenberg's 1964 clas sic, Coming ofAge in America, where "Amer ican high school students viewed the govern ment as a benign institution that one should obey because it was working for the benefit of all the people."l How is it possible for such a sad state of intellectual affairs to befall a nation founded on liberty and a rational view of the state? How did it come to be that mil lions ofAmericans recoil at the "radical" sug gestion that government and legalized force are one and the same? I can think of no other source of the prob lem than a century of government ("public") education. When nearly 90 percent of Ameri cans are schooled for 12 formative years by government employees, most of whom earned their teaching degrees at government univer sities, why should we expect anything other than an obsequious citizenry that views gov ernment as the benevolent vicar of what Rousseau called "the general will"?

The history ofAmerican public education is replete with statements by professional gov ernment school advocates that reek of statism. Judge Archibald Douglas Murphey, founder of the public school system in North Carolina, said that government must educate because "parents know not how to instruct them. . . . The state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare must take charge of those children and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened."2 A 1914 bulletin of the U. S. Bureau of Edu cation stated, "The public schools exist pri marily for the benefit of the State rather than for the benefit of the individual." And Edward Ross, a prominent sociologist, offered the most chilling description of the role of gov ernment in education: "To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private house holds and shape them on the social kneading board."3 This outcome was predictable from the ear liest days of American public education, and it's no different from anything else the gov ernment comes to dominate. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It just isn't in the interests of the government or those who depend on it to sully their own nests with an honest admis sion that their handiwork is financed and imposed at gunpoint. As education scholar Joel Spring put it 20 years ago, "A teacher, school administrator, or elected official in charge of schools may believe that his person al values represent the general values of the community; worse, he may think that his val ues should be adopted by the community."4 Such explicit statements notwithstanding, it would be hard and perhaps politically coun terproductive to argue that today's deficient government school system derives from some grand conspiracy. To explain the appalling ignorance of the American citizenry regarding the essential nature of government, conspira cy theories are not necessary. It's sufficient simply to observe that few employees of the system will rise above immediate self-interest to even recognize, let alone propagate, the notion that government in general and their jobs in particular rest on legalized force.

What difference does all this make? A lot. I can think of no situation more hostile to liber ty than a failure of a free people to tell the dif ference between government and everything else. D 1. Cited in William F. Rickenbacker, ed., The Twelve-Year Sen tence (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1999 [1974]), p. 140. 2. Quoted in Murray Rothbard, "Historical Origins," in ibid., p. 11. 3. Quoted in Joel Spring, The American School, 1642-1985 (New York: Longman, 1986), p. 155. 4. Quoted in Joel Spring, Educating the Worker-Citizen (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 14.