The Deadly Hemlock of Compulsory Education
The Common School, Parental Authority, and Protecting our Kids (Part 1)
The history of compulsory education is not a subject that I ever felt was well fleshed-out when I was a kid. I remember learning about Horace Mann and his Utopian vision for American schools through his “common school” plan, and I recall thinking, even as a child…if something is compulsory, then we’ve lost our choice in it. And if we’ve lost our choice, then we’re not free to do as we please. So, the question is: are we really free at all? Of course, my reasoning was based on the concept of a morality-driven constitutional republic, counting on basic moral law (based on the same Evangelical and Protestant concepts that the Founders were influenced by) to establish objective truth and reality in society so that a limited authority could administer justice to those in violation of the law…and leaving the rest to the people to decide individually, in their own homes.
In my youth, I was really confused by the concept of compulsory education, because it seemed like such a monumental jump for Americans to make. Pioneering, revolutionary, fire-hearted Americans were suddenly being subjected to a brand-new spirit of progressive educational idealism in the 1800s, and frankly, I never thought it made a lot of sense to implement mandatory education. Mandatory education is often a hallmark of a communist society – in fact, any mandated educational institution that comes from the top down is highly suspect, in my opinion.
Today, we’re going to examine the history of Horace Mann’s “common school,” the history of compulsory education, and why I believe that the slow death of American individual liberty is tangled up in the concept of mandatory schooling.
The Father of Education and the Common School
Education overhaul in America began with Horace Mann, who most of you probably know was the Secretary of Education in Massachusetts in 1837. He utilized his position (which, at that time, was brand new), to champion tax-funded public education. He also proposed that teachers should be formally trained, which better guaranteed the quality of education that children would receive. While many of his ideas were thoughtful and, for the most part, practical, this tidal wave of educational reform changed the entire purpose and bent of education, and therefore parenting, in America.
Prior to Horace Mann's education overhaul, schools in America were based primarily on what was called Calvinism (check out this link to learn a little bit more about that). Calvinism was centered on teaching moral principles and spiritual ideas, rooted in the Christian gospel. Local schools were small and usually funded by the community church - not the state or the federal government. This meant that the content of the schools was also controlled by parents and parishioners, rather than a board of elected (or appointed) politicians. It was simple, but the baseline idea was great: parents and locals maintained control over what their children were learning. Horace Mann's educational reforms took that control out of the hands of locals and placed it in the hands of the state - whether intentionally or not, this ultimately has not resulted in positive things for students in America.
Some of you may also know about the Morrill-Land Grant Colleges Act of the 1800s, in which the federal government offered grants to westward-pushing pioneer towns who promised to establish colleges. This laid the groundwork for an interconnected network of educational institutions across the country. In some ways, this was great. Brilliant minds were able to coalesce and develop ideas, study scientific theories, and advance technology like it had never been advanced before. Unfortunately, education in America would grow to monstrous proportions - taking the place of the American church and introducing students to Darwinism and secularism. In addition, the introduction of federal and state tax dollars into the school system created a dangerous and slippery slope for schools. When you take money from someone or something, there are usually strings attached. Expectations. Take state money, and you must obey state standards. This can be a good thing. Or, if morality is in decline, it can be a very bad thing. Separation of church and state was the battle cry of many education advocates. An illogical argument, to be sure. If the state wasn't involved in education in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem. Never mind the fact that separation of church and state is a phrase that is echoed nowhere in the United States Constitution, but rather, it exists as a sentence, taken out of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists Association (you can look at the letter here). Indeed, the Founders never intended for children to be schooled in secular common schools (as Horace Mann espoused). It was, after all, John Adams who said that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. Is it any wonder that the moral decline of America corresponds directly with the devolving slope of American education? Can you truly expect children, who grow up in school being taught little about right versus wrong, nothing about logic, nothing about reasoning, nothing about God, and nothing about morality to grow up and be a moral and religious people? You will be hard pressed to find that to be so, and that is where Horace Mann’s common school has led American children today.
What may have begun as a seemingly innocent idea to propagate a higher level of learning across America was quite dangerous. Educating children was moved out of the hands of the church and parents and into the hands of a sanitized and tax-funded system. And, as we all know, anything that comes from the government is often and easily corrupted.
Compulsory Education
The idea to make school attendance mandatory in America arose in the wake of the common school movement. According to Simpson (2004), every state in the Union had ratified compulsory school attendance by 1918, and interestingly enough, attendance and enrollment in public schools did not necessarily rise. In fact, according to Simpson’s article, there was no significant correlation between compulsory education and attendance in school, but there was certainly a 709 percent teacher salary increase. This is a fascinating tidbit of information, because it becomes clear that while compulsory education did nothing initially to force children into the classroom, it seemed to create a permanent source of financial feedback for educators and politicians who were advocating for compulsory education. How does that work? Well, if you want to increase your profit, you have to increase your demand. And, since education during the early 1900s was being funded by tax-dollars, the state or federal government could raise the salaries of teachers by robbing the pockets of the actual tax-payers themselves. It’s no different than, say, a pharmaceutical company who prescribes you a medicine that makes you sick, and then demands you pay them for treating that sickness that they gave you in the first place. They have created their own supply and demand.
So, we can see that there were suspicious things going on when compulsory education slapped America in the face. We can also see that most parents didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it or just outright ignored it.
Certainly, that has changed. Every state in the nation has their own compulsory education laws, with some demanding enrollment at the age of five and others at the age of eight. Today, parents are subject to legal penalties for truancy, which includes fines, juvenile court proceedings, or even criminal charges for parents who refuse to enroll their kids in school (check out this chart on state-by-state compulsory education laws).
I ask you…does that sound like freedom to you? When the government says that you must send your child to school, have you ever asked yourself why? We are so conditioned to accept what is in America that perhaps we don’t ask ourselves the question of how we got to this point.
So…kids shouldn’t be educated? Spoiler alert: That’s not what I’m saying!
Now, am I saying that children shouldn’t be educated or taught to read and write and do math? I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying, it’s the God-given responsibility and right of the parent to decide when, where, and if a child will attend school. Why does the government think it has the right to define when and how this happens? (Hint: because we handed over that right to them a century ago) What if a parent doesn’t want to enroll their kid in school? What if they want to raise them differently or within the confines and parameters of a different type of belief system and educational system? Is it not their right to do so? Why has the government taken the form of our daycare nanny and stipulated what we can and cannot do with our own flesh and blood? Is it really the job of the government to define what is good for a child and what is not, educationally? In theory, it sounds nice to say, “Hey, there needs to be standards and expectations in education so that we can set kids up to succeed!” But kids were succeeding before compulsory education, and they would have continued to succeed. School didn’t have to be publicly funded – it could have remained privately-funded and controlled, and parents could have chosen to educate their kids if they wanted to, utilizing their local community to do so. Mandatory education was not some kind of Utopian balm that was going to fix perceived ignorance in America. It may have raised literacy rates, but at what cost?
I understand that there are alternative options to public school today. I get that. Even so, why do we have to register homeschools with the state? Why do we even have to go through the paperwork? We’re asking them for permission to school our children. We’re begging them to allow us to raise our children the way we want to. Is this concept not disturbing to people?
My point is this: we’re either all the way for freedom or we’re not at all for freedom.
I understand the arguments on both sides for and against homeschooling, and that’s not what this article is about. I’m not here today to offer my opinion on the pros and cons of homeschooling (because I certainly have them!). I’m here to ask questions that will get you to think about the concept of mandatory schooling from a new perspective. I’m here to ask you: where has your choice gone?
Every educational system, no matter how great it is, will have its flaws. Because we’re human and we all mess up. The point of this article is to simply pose a question. How have we voluntarily given up our parental authority to the nanny state, trusting daycare and teachers and peers to do the heavy lifting of raising our children? How did this happen? I heard someone put it like this in a recent interview: we don’t give strangers the keys to our car and let them drive it around all day. And yet, we hand our kids over to perfect strangers at school all day long and allow them to raise our kids out of our sight when they enter public schools. I’m not denigrating the value or worth of good, hardworking teachers. I’m pointing out the facts: we’re handing over precious minds to a social construct that we really don’t know anything about. Just look at the information that is coming out of schools every day, thanks to moms and dads who are scouring curriculum and tapping into what’s really going on in the classrooms across America. Everything from gender theories to critical race theory is being slipped into school, and often, the school is hiding it from you.
Social media and the progressive bent of education (and how young teachers are being trained today) are affecting your children’s rapidly-evolving worldview. And frankly, if you’re not sitting next to your kids every single day, you cannot – and you will not – protect them from the underlying statist agenda that is being implemented in the name of education.
America’s Individual Liberty Dumpster Fire
America’s freedoms have been flushed down the proverbial toilet one little piece at a time. Compulsory education, over-regulation, social justice policies, and the watering-down of the Christian gospel in churches (which also has its roots in the corruption of education…even private institutions have been infested with Marxist ideology, which I talk about here).
I’m not here to advocate for homeschooling or unschooling or no schooling. Today’s article is just a question. How far is too far? When you give up something as basic and as primal as the right to decide how or if your children go to school, I believe you’ve given up something of yourself that cannot be taken back.
None of us can help the fact that we were born into this system. We were bred to accept the societal structure that surrounds us. The idea of compulsory education for our children has been a rotten one from the start, but it’s one that has been normalized and celebrated and revered. It is so deeply embedded into our culture that I don’t believe there will ever be any coming back from it, because parents today believe they need public schools to raise their children.
What this means is that now, realistically, parents have to work within the confines of a rigidly structured and morally corrupted system to try and parent their kids – and it’s all-out warfare. Culture and education and government are fighting to claim the minds of your kids, and if you’re not actively involved in the fight, the chances that they will grow up to become the social activists that they are being groomed to become from kindergarten is pretty high.
So, the burden is on us. We have to work with what we’ve got. We must advocate for goods laws. Reform. Curriculum and classroom transparency. We’ve got to be involved. To have conversations with our children. To do whatever we can, however we can, to wrestle away control from a corrupted government and place that authority back where it belongs: with us, the parents.
Remember, your tax dollars are paying for school, so in reality, you should be controlling the content of what your child is learning. You have that right. You do not need a degree or a credential to fight for the mind and heart of your child.
You just need a little courage.
Resources
These are the kinds of topics that really challenge me to think deeply and ask hard questions. Education in America is one of those topics that could be discussed all day, but I always feel like we’re coming at it from the wrong angle. What are the roots? Why do we have the laws that we do? What was the original intent here? Has it changed? Is it effective? Why do we believe what we believe and do what we do?
It’s never easy to draw a line from A to B, but sometimes drawing that hard, red line helps us to take the scales from our eyes, so to speak.
And truth always has a much more positive effect than a lie.
Next time, I’ll be concluding this series with an in-depth look at the money trails that you can follow in and out of education, from the college level down to the elementary level. We’ll be talking about who funds what, how the money is used, and what effects the corruption of education is really having on a detailed level.
Here are some resources for you if you’d like to learn more about the history of Horace Mann, compulsory education, and the corruption of our nanny state government:
Superman Exposes Myth of the Common School, by Jennifer Marshall
Government Nannies, by Catherine Duffy (the first book I ever read about Goals 2000 and outcome-based education…I think I was around 13 when I read it)
The Rise and Fall of the Bible in US Classrooms, by Robert Marquand
The Importance of Morality and Religion in Government , by WallBuilders