Education

There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.

Liberalism, p. 115

European totalitarianism is an upshot of bureaucracy’s preeminence in the field of education. The universities paved the way for the dictators.

Bureaucracy, p. 87

The pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only textbooks supporting their ideas are used.

Planning for Freedom, p. 162

Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance ideas of which they themselves approve.

Human Action, p. 868; p. 872

The majority of the students espouse without any inhibitions the interventionist panaceas recommended by their professors.

Human Action, p. 871; p. 875

What has made many of the present-day universities by and large nurseries of socialism is not so much the conditions prevailing in the departments of economics as the teachings handed down in other departments.

Human Action, p. 871; p. 875

What is wrong with the discipline that is nowadays taught in most universities under the misleading label of economics is not that the teachers and the authors of the textbooks are either not businessmen or failed in their business enterprises. The fault is with their ignorance of economics and with their inability to think logically.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, p. 78

Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

Liberalism, p. 114

Western Europe developed the system of obligatory public education. It came to Eastern Europe as an achievement of Western civilization. But in the linguistically mixed territories it turned into a dreadful weapon in the hands of governments determined to change the linguistic allegiance of their subjects. The philanthropists and pedagogues of England who advocated public education did not foresee what waves of hatred and resentment would rise out of this institution.

Omnipotent Government, pp. 82–83

The modern American high school, reformed according to the principles of John Dewey, has failed lamentably, as all competent experts agree, in the teaching of mathematics, physics, languages, and history.

Economic Freedom and Interventionism, p. 171

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

Human Action, p. 311, p. 314

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. . . . The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it.

Bureaucracy, p. 71