Mandatory Schooling, Remote Learning, and Government Schools

From the New York Times: When school is voluntary by David Leonhardt:

More than a century ago, U.S. states put in place laws requiring that children attend school. The guiding principle was that school mattered too much to children’s lives to be a matter of individual choice.

My emphasis. This is an interesting comment. It begs the question, “What is the primary purpose of education?” I say it’s to teach the child to think critically and independently so as to prepare the child to make her own individual choices throughout their adult lives. Apparently, that is not the goal of the advocates of compulsory school laws.]

Helping on the family farm or getting a paid job was not a good enough excuse to drop out. Nor was parental convenience or preference. And students could not leave school simply because they wanted to.

Mandatory schooling laws did an enormous amount of good. They increased high school graduation rates and the share of students who attended college, as research by the economists Derek Messacar and Philip Oreopoulos has found. The extra schooling, in turn, lifted future earnings and reduced future unemployment.

Note that government schools are not mentioned. Also, mandatory schooling is a vague term. Parents do have a moral obligation to educate. If they don’t -- e.g., if a child can’t read at age 10 -- child neglect laws have a valid place. So it’s how you define mandatory schooling that is the crux of the matter. Mandatory schooling doesn’t have to involve government schools. Nor should it be legally mandated.

But the idea that mandatory schooling laws did an enormous amount of good is a vast overstatement, especially when coupled with government schooling. It can be argued that it has done more harm than good, given that most kids are funnelled into Progressive government schools. 

The problem with remote school is that children learn vastly less than they do in person, according to a wide range of data about the past year and a half.

Remote schooling, a la COVID measures, is not the same as homeschooling. Homeschooling is widely recognized as a superior education. Of course, most parents don’t have the wherewithal or motivation to homeschool, which for serious parents is a career in and of itself. Remote schooling is a watered down version of in-school education. But it is important at this point to stress that homeschooling is also in-person, and it is not remote learning. 

So, if we’re talking about remote—that is, on-line—learning, the article may have a point. On-line courses have their place, I’m sure. But on-line probably shouldn’t be the core of education.

But I think the implication expected to be drawn from this article is that mandatory in-person government schooling is the only avenue to an educated population. Well, we’ve had that for a century, and the results can only be considered mixed at best and a failure at worst. Literacy is still not universal. Math proficiency is poor. And battles over curriculum and/or education philosophy are routine because of dictatorial school boards and the monopolistic power of the teachers union. Socialist central planning that empowers governments, local, state, or federal, to impose one-size-fits-all policies on everyone leads to constant battles, such as the current civil war over the teaching of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, as well as the ever-present friction over religion, like “intelligent design” vs. evolution, in the government schools. 

The problem is, we all don’t agree on what education means. To Progressives, it means training children to prioritize group authority and emotions over objective thinking. To others it means independent, reality-oriented thinking over conformity to the group. 

Of course, how we define “individual choice” also matters. If we’re talking about children’s choice, of course they shouldn’t be allowed to just drop out. But individual parental choice is another matter entirely. Parental school choice is exactly what we need, on a universal scale. The quality and diversity of education options would abound, as educators would have to compete to persuade parents to voluntarily pay for their service and voluntarily send their children to their schools and accept their methods and curriculums. Ideally, a complete separation of education and state, where the state neither pays for, administers, or regulates education,is what a fully free society should have. But, politically, it’s too soon to advocate for an end to “free”—tax-funded—education in the short to intermediate term. But it’s not too soon to transition to a system in which education tax dollars follow the student, whether through properly structured tax credits or by having the per-pupil cost of public schooling follow the student (Education Savings Accounts), and to fight for full privatization of school administration, whether charter schools, homeschooling, and secular or religiously run schools. 

Yes, children should attend school. But individual choice—parental choice—not mandatory submission to top-down dictated bureaucratic choice, should be the means. After all, as Milton Friiedman correctly observed, “Not all 'schooling' is 'education,' and not all 'education' is 'schooling'.” Only a free market can sort that out, and is the only chance to arrive at the best results.

Related Reading:

The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard

Compulsory Schooling Laws: What if We Didn't Have Them?

Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education.

The Myth that Americans Were Poorly Educated before Mass Government Schooling 

Early America had widespread literacy and a vibrant culture of learning.

93 Vermont Towns Have No Public Schools, But Great Education. How Do They Do It?

Chris Christie’s School Choice Achievement.

A Newark, NJ Mother Demonstrates the Educational Power of Parental School Choice

Related Viewing:

The Assault on Homeschooling and Freedom in Education by ARI

On this Day in 1963, Martin Luther King Endorsed Americanism

On August 28, 1963, Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech to a burgeoning March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I commemorated that day in an article for The Objective Standard, “I Have a Dream”: Martin Luther King Urges Consistency to Founding Principles. It's worth reading and listening to the attached video of King's speech.

Related Reading:

Martin Luther King: An 'Authentic American Hero'—or Not?

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—Ayn Rand

Martin Luther King: Right On Racial Justice, Wrong On ‘Economic Justice’

A New Textbook of Americanism: The Politics of Ayn Rand -- Jonathan Hoenig, Editor

The Maplewood Board of Education’s Shameful Snub of Thomas Jefferson

 The Maplewood Board of Education’s Shameful Snub of Thomas Jefferson

Citing slave ownership, N.J. district to change name of Jefferson school, read the heading of a small blurb in the 8/19/21 New Jersey Star-Ledger. As Chris Sheldon reports:

By this time next year, Jefferson Elementary School in Maplewood will have a new name as school district officials were looking to cut the school’s tie to one of America’s founding fathers due to his affiliation with slavery.

That Founding Father is, of course, Thomas Jefferson, the man who authored the Declaration of Independence, the document that declared the liberty equality of all men. That Declaration was the tip of a massive philosophical and moral revolution that would be the death knell of slavery in America and around the world.

The South Orange Maplewood Board of Education approved a resolution Monday to rename the school to one that will “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment” by the 2022-23 school year.

A respectful learning environment? These board members don’t know the first thing about learning, education, or history, apparently. They don’t understand how history works and evolves. 

History is an evolutionary process driven primarily by philosophy. Jefferson was instrumental in ending slavery by articulating the most anti-slavery ideas ever articulated as the philosophic foundation of a nation. The Maplewood school board may not get it, but the Abolitionists certainly did. So did the Confederate leaders. The Abolitionists embraced Jefferson. The Southern slavocracy rebelled against him. Said Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 4th of July speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,

You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country. [emphasis in original]

Douglass held up Jefferson’s words to call out the hypocrisy of American slavery. He did not repudiate Jefferson. Those words fueled his Abolitionist activism. He went on:

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.

The “forces in operation,” Douglass understood, included “the great principles” that Jefferson articulated -- and that indeed guaranteed “the doom of slavery.” 

Contrast Douglass with a leading political leader of the newly formed Confederacy.  Said Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his famous 1861 oration known as the Cornerstone Speech declaring the South’s repudiation of the foundational principle of the Declaration of Independence, 

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." [my emphasis]

Unlike the Maplewood board, Stephens, like other pro-slavery thinkers, understood the power of Jefferson’s words and the danger they posed to the slave-holding South.

One need not forgive Jefferson’s “affiliation with slavery” to recognize Jefferson’s true place in history, that of the antithesis of slavery. Jefferson occupied a unique place in history. He sat at a major historic intersection--the intersection of the death throes of slavery and the ascendency of Enlightenment liberalism. He represented both the old that was on its way out, and the new that was on its way in. His slaveholding was hypocritical, but it represented the old. His leadership in the American Revolution represented the new -- the philosophical and moral revolution that was for the first time recognizing the equality and inalienable individual rights of all human beings regardless of color, origin, status, gender, or wealth. The signers of the Declaration, whatever their flaws and hypocrisies, engineered a tectonic shift under human history: They signed the death warrant for African slavery, and slavery everywhere. 

That, not Jefferson’s slaveholding, is what we revere and celebrate in Thomas Jefferson. He left the world an enduring intellectual fuel for the march of liberty. He left the world a better place. This is why freedom and justice warriors like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther king Jr., and Harvey Milk called on Jefferson for support. It seems the Maplewood board’s definition of “inclusive” does not include some great Americans, or those millions of we ordinary Americans who revere them. If the South Orange Maplewood School Board were serious about its commitment to “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment,” it would integrate the recommendations of the Open Letter to the National School Boards Association & Local School Boards by 1776 Unites, a nonpartisan and intellectually diverse black-led alliance of writers, educators, thinkers, and activists. The open letter urges adoption of its curricula that, among much more, calls on America’s schools to

confronts the realities of slavery and racism in American history while also recognizing them as betrayals of our founding’s highest principles. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson are celebrated in our history despite, not because of, their personal and political failings. The struggle of Americans to rise and realize our own values is part of our story—and always has been.

Maplewood’s action is not a repudiation of slavery. It is a repudiation of American ideals. It is a kowtow to ignorance, and a slap in the face to the memory of slaves. Somewhere, the ghost of Alexander H. Stephens is smiling down on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. Shame on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. It does not deserve to have the word “Education” attached to its heading.

Related Reading:

July 4, 1776: 'Words that Will Never Be Erased'

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Nike Shamefully Turns it’s Back on Americanism

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of

Independence

QUORA: ‘Why do law schools teach constitutional law but not the Declaration of Independence as an animating principle?’

Another Reactionary’s Flawed Framing of American Ideals

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

QUORA: What's to stop a state . . . from making a law that just says their parties electors are chosen by default?'

 QUORA: Since the constitution leaves it up to the state legislature on how electors are chosen. What's to stop a state like Texas or Georgia from making a law that just says their parties electors are chosen by default? No elections I think they could.

I posted this answer:

I have no idea what is meant by “by default.”

But Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution reads: 

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

This means that the legislature can appoint the Electors. This does not mean, however, “no elections.” The legislators are, after all, elected representatives. This only means that the voters are involved indirectly through the legislators they vote for to represent them. This is perfectly legitimate. Remember that the United States is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. The definition of “republic” is 

a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law. 

So the legislature, the “elected officers and representatives responsible to” the voting citizens, can bypass a direct popular vote, and appoint electors themselves. Of course, since the 19th century, the popular vote method has been the “Manner” of choice for all of the states. However, the actual Electors are chosen by political party convention. It is this slate of electors that the voters cast their ballots for. For example, each presidential candidate represents a slate of electors chosen by his respective party. When people vote, they are actually voting for the slate of electors representing their candidate, not the actual candidate. The slate of electors chosen to attend the Electoral College in December is that of the winning candidate, who is chosen by popular vote.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘Why does the Electoral College of the United States of America exist?’

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right

Wouldn't going by Popular Vote be an even worse system than the Electoral College?

Was the Electoral College a ‘Compromise to Protect the Institution of Slavery?’

Censorship-By-Proxy is Real, and it's Here

From Joe Biden Is Trying to Impose Online Censorship by Proxy by Jacob Sullum for Reason. All emphasis are mine:

The administration’s public pressure campaign against COVID-19 "misinformation" cannot be reconciled with its avowed respect for freedom of expression. 

President Joe Biden wants to suppress speech that discourages Americans from being vaccinated against COVID-19. Because the First Amendment does not allow him to do that, he is asking Facebook and other social media companies to do it for him.

“Asking!?!” 

Or at least that's the way White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who calls the Biden administration's demands for speech restrictions "our asks," describes the situation. But given the federal government's power to make life difficult for Facebook et al., the line between a request and a command is hazy, and so is the line between private content moderation and government censorship.

Psaki's assurances are hard to take seriously given the public pressure that the Biden administration is applying, its ability to launch litigation and support legislation that hurts social media companies, and its threat of "legal and regulatory measures." If those companies do what the president wants by cracking down on speech he does not like, they will be acting as the government's agents.

I've been warning about censorship-by-proxy for a long time. The politicians can't directly censor, because of the First Amendment. But they have a powerful backdoor weapon, the regulatory state. Politicians can "arm twist" companies into submission by threatening regulation, in particular antitrust enforcement. The antitrust "laws" are particularly powerful. They're not really laws. They are unAmerican statutes that grant government arbitrary power, the tool of authoritarianism. Antitrust gives politicians power to prosecute any business for anything, at any time, at will. It's Al Capone "politics," not law. And it's a powerful means of censorship-by-proxy. Given that politicians of both parties are already threatening social media companies with antitrust, how much choice do they have to resist political demand to censor their users?

This demonstrates the integral—and fragile—nature of rights. This case shows how economic controls are used to silence free speech. Intellectual freedom is not possible without economic freedom. Don't blame the social media companies. The dollar is no match for a bullet. Blame the government, and anyone who supports the regulatory/antitrust state. 

Related Reading:

The Banning of Alex Jones: Facebook Choice or Regulatory Extortion?

Malinowski's Censorship-By-Proxy 'Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act' Advances

Facebook Backtracks on Free Speech Policy; Political Extortion?

Social Media and the Future of Civil Society by Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard

Americans Abandoning Free Speech Better Brace for the Consequences by J.D. Tuccille for Reason: Government will happily suppress misinformation in favor of misinformation of its own.

Dem Rep Malinowski Reprises Trump in Proposed Legislative Attack on Social Media and Free Speech.

A Conversation About Facebook, the First Amendment, Antitrust, and “The Electronic Octopus”

SCHOLARS WITH THUMBSCREWS: ANTITRUST’S PREDATORY ACADEMICS by Tom

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

In Justice Department Sues Georgia Over New Voting Restrictions, Claiming Discriminatory Intent, Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella reports

The Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit today challenging several portions of Georgia's contentious new voting law, which the Justice Department alleges were enacted with the intent "to deny or abridge the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of race or color."

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, the Justice Department alleges that portions of Georgia's Senate Bill 202, enacted into law in March, violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting laws.

But allegations of discrimination are not the fundamental danger behind this lawsuit. ((I think the racial discrimination charge is bogus and politically motivated.) The philosophy that underpins the Justice Department’s lawsuit is the real danger. 

"The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press release. "This lawsuit is the first step of many we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote; that all lawful votes are counted; and that every voter has access to accurate information."

My Emphasis.

The idea that voting is "the right from which all other rights ultimately flow” is a dangerous totalitarian premise. It implies that our liberty rights are the property of the state, to be granted, denied, or rescinded by the state, simply because the government has been elected. 

A free society, and America itself, depends on protecting individual rights from all forms of tyranny, including majoritarian or electoral tyranny. This issue lies at the heart of the long-running Democracy-vs.-Republic controversy. But the Declaration of Independence is clear: Our fundamental rights are “unalienable” -- meaning are not subject to the whims of the government or of elections. While it’s true that “The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy,” our democracy is itself limited by our fundamental rights to life, and liberty--rights that include freedom of speech, property rights, a jury trial of our peers, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, and others.

It's not surprising that the Biden Justice Department is using this inverted understanding of rights. It is, after all, the Democratic Party. Democrats believe that anyone's rights can be subordinated to and/or abrogated by any government policy so long as the policy is enacted by elected officials or their bureaucratic proxies. That is what voting as “the right from which all other rights ultimately flow" means. If voting is primary, then the antebellum Southern States were justified in claiming that slavery should be decided by a vote of the residents of each state, a position that the Democratic Party endorsed at its inception in 1828.

Isn’t the rejection of the idea that rights come from government a central catalyst that drove the American Revolution? Yes. The colonists had long considered themselves English, with the rights of Englishmen. But when the Crown started systematically infringing the colonists' rights in the 1760s, the colonists recognized the danger: If a government, in their case a king and the British parliament, could grant rights, it could just as easily take them away. So they turned toward a firmer foundation for their rights. They turned to the Enlightenment thinkers, especially John Locke, the first thinker to recognize what has become known as the natural rights of man, every individual man. The Democratic Party, from its founding in 1828, never recognized natural rights. It has been a reactionary force undermining America from its founding in 1828, when its Southern wing openly defended slavery and its more “moderate” Northern faction adopted the view that slavery should be determined democratically, at the state level, by popular vote!

Yes, the Democratic Party once endorsed the position that a majority can vote a minority into slavery! This is what it means to say that "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is . . . the right from which all other rights ultimately flow"--or not flow!

This is contrary to the principles of a free society, and to what the Founders created. As explicitly established in the Declaration of Independence, individual rights come before government, the establishment of which is designed “to secure these rights, which in turn necessitates voting; the requirement of the government “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” If rights ultimately flow from elected governments, then they are arbitrary constructs dependent upon political whim. Such “rights” are not, in fact, rights. They are privileges awarded on the expediency of the last election to ever-shifting politically powerful voting constituencies. 

As John Locke teaches, and as Ayn Rand confirms and solidifies, rights are moral principles that derive from the fact that man is a being guided by reason, and thus must be free to use his reason to guide his life. Unless you believe that government created reason, you cannot logically claim that “The right of all eligible citizens to vote is . . . the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.” Under that premise, with everyone’s liberty and property at risk in every election, elections become increasingly contentious battles, ultimately disintegrating into paralysis, chaos, and ultimately violent tribal conflict. Without an objective standard of inalienable rights that is always beyond the electoral fist, it can be no other way. 

Strictly speaking, the right of all eligible citizens to vote is a central pillar of our democratic process. But democracy is not the central pillar of a free society. 

It’s no surprise that Democrats are so obsessed with voting. With little respect for the nature-based inalienability of individual rights, they see winning elections as a path to unlimited power. The fact is, a civil free society depends on understanding a vital, rock-solid truth: Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right. A government, even an elected government, that can determine who has rights, what those rights are, and can alter or abolish rights at will is a totalitarian state. That’s the terrible end from which the idea that voting rights is “the right from which all other rights ultimately flow” leads. Totalitarian tyranny flows from the premise that rights come from the government. 

Related Reading:

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

Statistical Disparities Don’t Proof Discrimination in Voter ID Laws

Freedom Is Not About the Right to Vote, So I’m Voting Anti-Democrat Across the Board

16 Year Old Voters? How About 21?

The Vote: Get Off Your Butt and Register—But Keep the Nanny State Out of It

Related Viewing:

What Are Rights and Where Do They Come From? by Harry Binswanger