A Response to Education and the State

Responding to my post on education and the state, a reader emails:

The role of the state in democratic education should be limited simply to this: to set the rule that everyone be educated. No standards should be established, except perhaps that everyone be able to read. Comparing Athens and Rome, it seems that democratic (or at least partially democratic) societies leave education completely to the family. It was entirely privatized.

De Tocqueville's observations are also very interesting. He points out that the States merely made the law that everyone be educated. The establishment and administration of these laws (except in Connecticut perhaps) was completely a local matter. Thus the citizens in a small town raised their own moneys, built their own schools, and hired their own teachers. In Gatto's book Underground History of Public Education (which is all online and worth reading), he points out that the new System leveled all the old school houses to build prisonlike, bureaucratized, mammoth schools. The purpose was to centralize control and administration, to take the schools out of the hands of parents and teachers, neighborhoods and small towns; to put them under the control of "administrators" who never taught before but who implemented the new procedures of the self-appointed and altogether new educational elite. Gatto makes the convincing argument (even if it be a bit one-sided) that willy-nilly the purpose of the New System is not education but keeping the masses dumb, only smart enough to follow procedures required by industrialized and technologized society, not intelligent or ballsy enough to question them. They were Conditioners, in Lewis' sense of the term.