Posted on 08/20/2002 4:22:40 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
One of the most common arguments given against parents' teaching their children at home, and in favor of government-controlled schooling, is that, without schooling of the kind provided by our rulers, children cannot be socialized to life in modern America. But the question is never asked, exactly what is this socialization which Americans are supposed to impose on their children, and why is it of such great importance that many people give it more weight than any other aspect of schooling? If we look at the meaning of the word, we find two branches, one of which is that of making a person fit to deal with others, that is, giving him certain inhibitions and a rudimentary stock of manners, so that he will not offend other people. The other meaning of "socialize" is to organize or form in accordance with the principles and aims of socialism. This second meaning may seem to have little to do with the first one, but it will turn out in the end that it has much to do with the socialization that goes on in the schools.
It is significant that the word "socialization" is used for the process that takes place in the schools. This word sounds wonderfully scientific and up-to-date, and, in fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used in the early Nineteenth Century in what appears to be an article on economics and trade. It is a fitting word for what goes on in the public schools. Instead of a father passing on to his son the traditions and customs of his country, we have teachers training children in the same way that a master trains his dog. The child is to be socialized, to be conditioned by the school, so that he will behave as the government wants him to behave.
To understand what this socialization actually amounts to, we have to consider what takes place in the government schools. One of the first things that we notice is that Americans spend the whole of their childhood and their first few years as adults in government schools. The second thing we notice is that, in a government school, or in a school run along the lines of a government school, everyone is separated into groups, the most important group being that determined by the age of the people in it. The third thing that we notice is that not much learning is done. The fourth thing we see is that modern classroom schooling is designed to submerge the individual into the mass.
Modern schooling is actually but one piece of the whole process, which operates practically from their birth, of turning children into units of mass man. From the age of five or six up to the age of seventeen or eighteen, children are separated from their parents, divided into groups organized by age, and subjected to the authority of government agents. The bureaucratic structure of government schooling is designed for control, rather than for learning, and it has the effect of turning children into passive recipients of the training carried on by the teachers. Rigidly defined periods signalled by a bell, periodic announcements coming from the public address systems, frequent mass meetings-none of the these things are conducive to learning. Neither is the matter taught to children, nor are the techniques used to teach it, designed to facilitate real learning. Reading is deliberately taught in such a way, through "whole word" or "look-say" techniques, as to hinder any but the most determined child from ever learning to read. Young children spend several years going over the same elementary parts of arithmetic, and are encouraged to use "manipulatives", that is, to count on their fingers, when working out problems. Memorization is discouraged, and that at a time when the child delights in repeating lists and rules out loud, and his memory for new things and appetite for information are very keen. In later years, when the children reach the age at which reason awakens, formal logic never appears, not even logic of the simplest kind. If the children are lucky, they might learn something about reasoning from Euclidean geometry (if this subject is taught in their school), but, even then, reasoning is applied only to the task of proving theorems in geometry, and is kept isolated from all other subjects.
The real lesson taught in the government schools is the lesson of group identity and the omnicompetence of government. Group identity is one means by which government exacts the servile obedience demanded of children in the public schools. Rules abound, and they underline the assumption of absolute authority by the government. Guns are evil, and it is wicked even to draw a gun on a piece of paper, but guns in the hands of government agents are good. All drugs are very bad, even aspirin and drugs for allergies, unless the school nurse administers them. Singing Christmas carols, or even learning about the Nativity of our Lord, violates the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, but learning about Islam does not.
The group identities imposed upon children from their first day in school spawn gangs and cliques by the time the children reach high school, and these breed hatreds that sometimes erupt in mass murder. Real friendship is effectively discouraged because it separates children from the mass, and can even forge strong ties between children who are supposed to remain in their separate age groups; yet the schools attempt to force children to associate with all other children who are their own age, regardless of their interests or taste in friends. Group identity becomes the only identity allowed to the child.
The socialization brought about by the schools is an artificial condition that makes the modern child dangerously unfit for adult life. In socializing children, government schools do not teach them the moral virtues, they teach them to accept current cant. The public school teachers are not trying to impart courtesy, courage, or charity to their charges; they are conditioning them to believe that there is no such thing as truth, to esteem themselves, to be resentful of all intellectual or moral superiority in others. The separation of children by age makes them incapable of normal interaction with anyone who is very much older or younger than themselves even when they become older, and their separation from the adult world freezes them in a state of childishness that can persist throughout their lives.
Childishness is perhaps the main result of mass forced schooling. Because we are immersed in the world that we built up in the twentieth century, we tend not to notice that much of what we take for granted in our civilization was unheard of in previous ages. The concept of adolescence is one key to understanding what mass forced schooling and the modern culture it has helped to produce have done to human beings. Before the twentieth century, the idea that there is a sort of intermediate stage of life between childhood and adulthood would have been laughed at. A sixteen-year-old boy was considered a man, and expected to be making his way in the world, whether as a university student, or a journeyman craftsman, or a soldier. The difficulties that young men and women go through in their teens are not natural to their time of life; they are caused by a society and a system of schooling that treats adults as children, that deliberately prevents them from growing up.
Before the coming of mass forced schooling, girls of the age of eleven or twelve were not silly and childish, did not associate exclusively with one another, and were already learning to take on adult responsibilities. Before the late Nineteenth Century, young women of the age of fifteen were often already married and managing a household. In one case in late medieval times, a young Englishwoman of the age of fifteen married a merchant who traded internationally, and when he fell ill a year later, she took care of his business while she nursed him back to health. In the United States, during the War of 1812, David Farragut, who was the first admiral in the United States Navy, was commissioned midshipman on the warship Essex at the age of ten. He saw action on the Pacific coast of South America, and at the age of twelve he was chosen to command the prize crew of a captured British ship. In ancient Persia, at the age of seventeen, Cyrus the Younger, the second son of Darius II, the King of Persia at the time, was made the satrap of Lydia, Greater Phrygia, and Cappadocia, and the military commander of all of western Asia Minor. In colonial America, Benjamin Franklin had only two years of schooling, and yet he learned to read so early that he could not remember the time before he was able to read. By the time he reached twenty-six he had his own printing house where he was publishing his own newspaper, and he had begun to publish the work that made him famous, Poor Richard's Almanac.
Now, after more than one hundred years of mass forced schooling, a sixteen-year-old boy who loves to work with his hands, and who would be quite capable of learning how to use machine tools, and then earning his living as a skilled craftsman, is kept in a government institution all day long. When he is not in a classroom he is usually spending his time on "extra-curricular activities". If he works at all, it is as an employee in some service business. As a properly socialized "adolescent" he is, of course, incapable of independent thought and action. Someone else must originate everything that he does. If he must work during the school year, the best thing to do with him (after years of deliberately not teaching him how to do elementary arithmetic) is to stand him in front of a cash register in a Macdonald's.
After being graduated from high school, this young man may well go to college, and "earn" some sort of "degree". But intellectually he will remain a child all his life. He will be incapable of producing or following a chain of reasoning, and he will not be able to recognize invalid arguments, not even when he sees them in print and so has time to think about what he is reading. Because of this he will be an easy mark for propaganda, and tend to become a mere passive receiver of the artificially concocted emotions and attitudes manipulated by the propagandists. Long years of schooling will have made him incapable of learning anything on his own, and he will associate all learning with classroom instruction by a supposed expert. The absurd credentialism so prevalent in modern America will have laid hold of him, and he will see nothing odd in the existence of schools of journalism in universities.
This young man will bring the same attitude to the world of work, and it will be reinforced by the way in which corporations are organized. In fact, it is quite likely that the very structure of modern corporations is, at least in part, a result of the socialization imposed by modern schooling. The emphasis on "teamwork", and the way in which control and direction of work proceed from the top down, replicate the environment of schooling. The young man who goes through our system of schooling feels right at home in the corporate world, and he usually cannot even conceive of trying to escape it. Earning one's living in an independent manner, without being either an employee or an employer, is an idea utterly foreign to him.
In the long run mass forced schooling will destroy the civilization that has given rise to it. For the time being, our rulers will have what they want: willing slaves of the welfare state, docile workers for the corporations, and passive, easily manipulated subjects. The socialization of the schools has given rise to the kind of semi-socialist state that our rulers desired, but now it is affecting even them, and making them less and less capable of effectively wielding the power that they have arrogated to themselves. If we want to restore our commonwealth, we will have to do more than they did. They brought about the present state of affairs ostensibly for the sake of civilization. But civilization is not the highest and most important thing that there is, as many people, among them C. S. Lewis in his essay "First and Second Things", have pointed out. The will of God stands higher. And for that reason the ongoing movement for parents to pull their children out of the government schools is a good start: they are considering things more important than our modern civilization. As for how parents can teach their children so that they can resist the present trends, I can think of no better place to begin than to read Dorothy Sayers's talk "The Lost Tools of Learning."
Is there such a thing as "beneficial adolescent peer pressure?"
Maybe in a church setting, or a school run by a church... otherwise, I don't think so.
Two points. Firstly, one should distinguish the commitment to joint and the actions that haappen after one joins. It is true that the act of joining army, university, etc. is voluntary in our country (although, as you know, that has not always been the case either). After one joins, the army, there is hardly anything voluntary, however. And that was one of the points: life consits of most thinkgs that are not voluntary. Secondly, we are talking about children, in contrast to adults. The whole point of fiduciary duty of a parent is to make decisions for the child because he cannot. Whome schooling is no less forced therefore than sending a child to a pblic or private school: it is your decision.
In general, why does it matter to go to a "good" school or university? In most universities, the science and mathematics instructors will be likely to answer any question an undergraduate student might have. What they mostly differ in is the student population, not faculty. Whom you are with affects you, and often beneficially so.
Even if this were true, this is an argument against the current state of public education, not public education as a form.
It is an argument against the current system and the lack of choice and competition from it. The quality of education will not improve sufficiently as long as the system is in place. The fastest way to change the system right now is to pull children out of public schools.
More importantly, there has never existed a school that had more influence on the child than family. The only reason that the issue even exists is that parents in America have abrogated their parental duties. It is into this parenting vacuum that other ideologies step in. The author should complain why our churches and synagogues are not keeping up with the times to provide effective guidance to children and parents.
Families and churches and synagogues cant expect to win a war against the kind of indoctrination that grinds away in the public school system. There is no reason to surrender your children over to the enemy based on the idea that you can beat them in a war over your own children. You cannot fight the system through children.
True, but since the topic of the article was forced schooling AND socialization, the public/private school setting forces children to socialize only with those of the same age. I thought that was the topic of discussion, not the fact of compulsorary schooling, which is mandated by the states.
Bttt!
You can argue with some of the details but the fact remains:
Government "Education" = Government Propaganda
(I learned to read before starting school, so I was always a step ahead of the BS.)
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