It's a growing belief of mine that state-controlled education and its fashionable teaching methods, which so many classical liberals have criticized, fits a general philosophical program to undermine and disable maturing minds to keep the masses docile. Many have said it before – prescient writers saw the looming trouble during the expansion of progressive education and the advance of state control, and hardly a week goes by without me reading an article on the mess our present educational systems are in. In my own teaching practice, I tutor the children of parents brave enough to consider that the schools they entrust their children to might not be up to the job, so I have first hand knowledge of what Ayn Rand described in her essay, "The Comprachicos" – young minds struggling to make sense of the informational flow that's broadcast to them as they sit in the immanent turmoil of a modern classroom.
It is not an original thesis to suggest that modern education seeks a different conception of the child than what classical liberals have proposed, but it is interesting to note a very illuminating source that can easily be overlooked in the hurried search for the great political philosophy we love to spout – namely John Locke's theory of rights in his Second Treatise on Government. Locke's comments on children and education can be brought to bear on modern educational issues.
John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding has had a huge impact on education, and it is to this text that educationalists turn. Locke explains his theory that we are born with a blank brain (or no u2018software'), which then learns from the impressions it receives from its environment. The Essay has motivated thinkers from all sides of the political spectrum to champion their own particular brand of education, and while we can leave that debate to develop, we should not negate his thoughts on education in the Second Treatise.
Locke lived and wrote during the great political upheavals in 17th century England. Education had been spreading in the country for over a century as the ideas of the Renaissance (and later the Reformation) motivated churches to set up schools to teach a core curriculum. In the absence of state control and direction, which he would have abhorred, Locke argued that it is the parent's natural duty to preserve, nourish, and educate their children. (II56) Nature encourages parents to stay together, and they will naturally feel a tenderness towards their children that will seldom become vicious. (II 67) In other words, what he is arguing is that, if left to their own devices, parents will tend to bring up their children as they see fit and that manner will be appropriate.
Of course, Locke was writing before the welfare state altered the incentives of parents to stick together for the sake of the children: free schooling being one of them! And today, we are taught by the great politically motivated charities to distr wide ranging curriculum ust parents, for they can abuse their children – instead, let them be cared for by bureaucracies and the organs of the State, they suggest. The evidence of centralized child-care is, of course, sufficiently damning not to repeat here, but the philosophical thrust is to the Spartan educational system so enthusiastically promulgated by Plato (Cf. The Republic).
The latest ploy, current since the 1960s, is to teach pupils a wide- ranging curriculum that captures the modern trends that politicians think we ought to be training for, but which, in reality, because of all the chopping and changing, undermines pupils' ability to think and to reason. So if a parent believes his child has an aptitude for equestrian studies, tough! The child has to learn design, textiles, a foreign language, and even u2018citizenship'. Schools end up flitting from topic to topic that the government thinks they ought to know, and so the pupils do not learn a consistent and disciplined approach to any study. Instead they are allowed to mentally u2018free wheel'. Periodically, they are then tested according to standard criteria – the standard assessment test, which assumes that all the children passing through year 9 (aged 14) can be checked by a universal, one-size fits all, exam. Phew! On the one hand, they are encouraged to be individuals and to respect each other's feelings; on the other, they're told that really they're all the same. No doubt, the contradictory philosophies confuse the poor blighters, who are often just trying to survive the social hell of our comprehensive system! Accordingly, they mentally shut down. (I've seen many a quiet pupil almost physically hug the walls as they go from class to class in fear of the brutality of their louder, obnoxious classmates they are forced to share their schooling years with). So when it finally comes to assessment, the pupils ask what they should do, what they should write, what the answers are, and how they get the grades needed to proceed on in the government-controlled higher educational sector. Poor things.
Going back to Locke, we find a very strong argument for the promotion of reasoning in education. Reason is a faculty that requires development, but, Locke, notes, that development can only take place in a disciplined household. No whimsical free-wheeling child-centered, tree-hugging teaching permitted here! An adult's freedom and liberty in action, Locke explains, "is grounded on his having Reason." (II 63). Children cannot be u2018free' in any sense that progressive educationalists think they ought to be – and Locke would certainly find absurd any claim that freedom should be extended to the animal kingdom as some attempt to do! Although children are "born Free, as we are born Rational," he notes that we do not "have actually the Exercise of either: Age that brings one, brings with it the other too." (II 61) In other words, a child must learn to use his reason before he becomes a free man.
We can read Locke as believing that rational maturation would develop naturally and of its own accord, but another passage dismisses such a conclusion: "To turn [a child] loose to an unrestrain'd Liberty, before he has Reason to guide him, is not allowing him the privilege of his Nature to be free; but to thrust him out amongst Brutes, and abandon him to a state as wretched, and as much beneath that of a Man, as theirs."
Powerful words indeed and why did that naughty Frenchman who has so influenced Western educational theories, J-J Rousseau, not pay more attention to this passage?! (Well, he did enjoy relieving the responsibility of raising his own children onto local people – cf. his Confessions). And what an indictment of our modern schools, which, as George Reisman in his Capitalism describes, produce hordes of increasingly illiterate and innumerate yobs. (p.108) Such people, as many of us who take seriously our classical heritage already understand, are not capable of forming an opinion by themselves, or of examining properly and critically any argument they encounter. Locke describes such people as being like the brutes, so it is unsurprising that when given the vote, civilization's grand edifices begin to crumble.
Mises quips somewhere, how can we expect a knowledge of economics – so dependent on the exercise of reason – to expand to the Hindus, who worship cows? In our present cultural climate, few would dare advance such a thought in fear of offence: but the gist of it is vital to understand. Peace and co-operation are not likely to be sustained in any culture that derides reason – and when we turn that thought to our own culture, we shudder for the future.
In Locke's day, few people were formally educated in institutions, yet they were brought up on a religious education that gave them the wherewithal to challenge the advancement of the State in Stuart times, and, in Locke's childhood, to actively revolt alongside those who could explain to them the reasons for their distress. No such hope in modern Britain, methinks! Although I shall be demonstrating outside of Parliament on Monday against State intervention into hunting, I recognize that most of my generation and younger (i.e., the voting thirty- and twenty-somethings) will not be able to comprehend the seriousness of the debate – decades of increasing intervention and control of the school system, all supposedly with the damned child in mind, has left people reasonless. If they have an u2018opinion', it is a soundbite caught from the lips of others and passed around like a cold sore to remain embedded in the mind. Most who are challenged to think further on the subject (or any subject) blankly blink like a deer caught in the headlights. School teaches them to express their opinions of course, but only in the format of u2018opinions for' and u2018opinions against': it does not matter which side you fall in with and the possibility of one side being wrong is not considered at all. After all, they're not out to teach the kids to reason or to analyze a position logically.
Instead, our school leavers move like brutes from pleasure to pleasure, while holding down a job that keeps the pennies coming in. Accordingly, the application of the intellect to political matters is seriously dying out in Britain – many commentators have noted the growth of voter apathy, but where else can we seek the cause but the educational system that actively undermines the ability of children to think for themselves? (See the recent article in The Spectator, "Teaching Students not to think," by Andrew Conway, 7th Dec.) Thinking requires effort, and encouraging effort is not something State schools are capable of enforcing. Oh, but of course they enforce attendance! New measures are being introduced to fine parents 50 if their children abscond from school. Although welfare state has skewered incentives to be responsible, I also wonder how many truants are fleeing the irrationality and viciousness of the State's pedagogical production line?
As is well documented by libertarian and classical liberal critics, schools have become political footballs in which fashionable issues are paraded and imposed for a couple of years, before being forgotten, and then resurfacing with a new generation of educationalists. State schools in Britain fake and manipulate statistics to please the educational Czars – the Ofsted inspectors, who descend with clipboards from the Ministry of Education armed with the latest newspeak and to check whether the pupils understand their citizenship requirements as set out by the government, or whether they can turn a computer on and produce a nice graph using the preset tools.
The educational establishment as it has now developed has become a thoroughly entrenched system, which writers such as Ludwig Mises, Milton Friedman and C.Northcote Parkinson have explained the causes and effects of. Public choice theorists have elucidated the incentives such groups generate and how difficult it is for them to be reformed (or even abolished). But we face a growing problem: the ministries of education in the West are producing non-reasoning graduates. And then, they are unleashed on society, for they have attained the legal leaving age. Those in power may, like the priests of old, prefer to keep the population thusly ignorant, but those of us who know history and can foresee the repercussions should be afraid: the meek, conforming, masses possess no intellectual weapons with which to defend the fragile liberties they still enjoy.
