RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: When Bolshevik Schooling Came to America  Fri Mar 18, 2022 5:28 pm | |
| In my last essay in this series on the relationship between government and the education of children (“Why Government Schooling Came to America”), I provided a brief intellectual history of how and why a system of government schooling was established in the United State during the nineteenth century. The philosophic seeds of compulsion, collectivism, and statism in American schooling were first planted in the 1820’s and they came to fruition a few decades later.
As we saw, nineteenth-century American education “reformers” were deeply influenced by the Prussian model of government-run education. As I wrote:
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
In other words, America’s government school system was established by and for the State (i.e., whomever was in control of the government at any particular time and place).
Make no mistake about it: government schooling is backed by the coercive force of the State. Compulsory attendance laws must, for instance, be obeyed at the risk of legal punishment, which includes arrest, imprisonment, fines, and potentially the seizing (aka kidnapping) of one’s children. These are indisputable facts, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
The influential nineteenth-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer identified exactly what government schooling is and what it means in his Social Statics (1851):
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 mould children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen; is, and how the child may be moulded into one. 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 fulfil.[1]
.https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/when-bolshevik-schooling-came-to?s=r
 
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