Public schools: abolish them?

The Ayn Rand world has no room for public schools. They indoctrinate
instead of educating, and far from protecting rights, often violate
them.

Ayn Rand herself said little about public schools per se. She said, often scathingly, that most schools do not properly teach children about their own moral worth. In Atlas Shrugged
she poured contempt on teachers who taught pupils to conform instead of
standing up for justice or their rights. But she said little about
public schools directly.

But in one essay
(“Man’s Rights”), she directly criticized the Democratic Party for its
1960 platform. In that platform the Democrats mentioned eight “rights”
that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that every person should
expect from society. Those were not rights at all, but entitlements:
a job, “adequate” pay, guaranteed security, “a decent home,” “adequate
protection from economic fears,” and—the key—health care and education.

A single question added to each of [these guarantees] would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

In other words: these are goods and services. Someone has to
make them or do them. None of these have anything to do with protecting
real rights, and protecting people from one another.

Today, The Ayn Rand Institute says volumes
about public schools (and colleges and universities), and why free
citizens should abolish them. Thomas A. Bowden, in 2008, condemned a
California appellate judge for saying that children are State property. Of course, “State property” is a misnomer anyway; anything that the State holds is a common, not the property of any one person. The point here is that children are no\ one’s property or common. The adults who have responsibility for children are the parents or guardians, not the government.

The specific context of Bowden’s remarks is worse than the usual
context of “an entitlement from the State that other taxpayers must pay
for.” The defendant-appellant in that case chose to home-school her children, and a judge said that she may not do this. Why? Because

allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests

would lead somehow to social chaos.

Matters of conduct?

What “matters of conduct” do interest society? CNAV
can name at least five: do not murder, cheat, steal, lie, or covet.
What irony! These are the last five of the Ten Commandments. But public
schools must not teach anything called “The Ten Commandments.” That
would break “separation of church and state.” (Yet in California, no one
in authority objects to blending mosque and state. But CNAV digresses.) Furthermore, public school teachers teach their pupils to covet, both in lessons and by example.

A stack of school books with an apple on top.

The most important reason that any parent wants to home-school his or
her children is that the public schools have failed. Trade media for
the public school “industry” admits as much. In 2011, according to School Library Journal, only thirty-two percent of Americans graduating from high school were proficient in math, and thirty-one percent proficient in reading. These figures come from a Harvard University study.

Detractors of American freedom often cite figures like these. But this study looked at all American students, most of whom graduated from public schools. The Harvard team broke their sample down by race, but not by public schools v. private schools or home-schooling. They took no interest in schooling other than public schools, schooling that might give better results.

But more important than whether public schools work or not, is: by what authority does government keep a school? Ayn Rand focused on one problem only: schooling is a service.
Student and teacher (or parent and teacher) decide together, by mutual
consent, how much that service is worth. When government does any
service, it decides what it is worth. (And often it decides
that a school needs more administrators, and secretaries for the same,
than teachers.)

The California court opinion that Thomas Bowden objected to,
illustrates a worse problem. When the government teaches your children,
it decides what to teach. Basic subjects like math and reading present little controversy, other than how well
the schools teach math and reading. But when teaching the “Social
Studies,” and even science, teachers can and do distort reality and
social memory. Adolf Hitler perfected the art of distorting social
memory, and using government schools to do it. So, too, did Josef Stalin
and Mao Zedong. Barack Hussein Obama and his “czars” learned their own
lessons well.