Anything That’s Peaceful

• CHAPTER 17 •

EDUCATION FOR
ONE’S OWN SAKE

THIS CHAPTER is intended to suggest free market education as the appropriate alternative to government education.

In previous chapters I have tried to demonstrate that government is organized police force and that its function is to keep the peace; that education is a peaceful, creative, productive pursuit of the type disastrously affected by government intervention. Now, were government to step aside in education as it has stepped aside in religion—that is, if compulsory attendance, state dictated curricula, and forcible collection of the wherewithal to pay the school bill were omitted—education would be left to the free market.

Were this break with tradition to take place, what would happen?

Strange as it may first appear, no one can know! Some will say that this admission is a retreat from my argument that education would be improved if left to the free, competitive market. On the contrary, it is in support of the free market as the sole, effective means of improving education.

If you are compelled to do as someone else dictates, if unnatural obstacles are placed in your way, if you are relieved of responsibilities, I can at least predict that you will not function to your fullest in a creative sense. But no one can even roughly predict what wondrous things you will create if released from restraints and dictation, that is, if freed from obstacles. Indeed, you cannot make such predictions about yourself. What new idea will you have tomorrow? What invention? What will you do if a new necessity, an unexpected responsibility, presents itself? We know that creativity will be increased, nothing more.

Confining the discussion to education, assume that you are no longer compelled to send Johnnie to school; no government committee will prescribe what Johnnie must study; no government tax collector will take a penny of your or anyone else’s income for schooling. This, it must be emphasized, is the free market assumption.

Is Johnnie in any less need of learning than before? Are other persons—teachers, for instance—any less wise or less available for counsel and employment? Is there less money for educational purposes? If no longer compelled to pay the money in taxes, would you spend it on parties or cigarettes or alcohol or vacations rather than voluntarily spending it for Johnnie’s education? If so, you value Johnnie’s education less than you value indulging yourself. In any event you make a choice—a choice that you obviously think to be the better alternative; scarcely anyone would claim that he had decided to choose what he values least when he could choose what he values most.

Shall we say someone else thinks your judgment is bad if you decide in favor of vacations, for instance, as against Johnnie’s education? Do you wish the person who thinks your choice is wrong forcibly to impose his notion of right on you? If so, just where are you going to draw the line as to what choices others are to make for you? To authorize others to make your choices is to put yourself in the role of an automaton. You can’t believe that your choice is best and accept, at the same time, someone else’s verdict that it is the worst. This is utter nonsense. To apply police force to you is to contradict your judgments. If applied to others, it can only contradict their judgments. Who is the appropriate ruler of your educational program? You? Or others? Or a political committee which cannot be better than the lowest common denominator of others?1 The free market way relies not on one judgment for the millions but on millions of individual judgments.

Religious Freedom

Why should not education be just as self-determined as religion? Is education more important than religion? Americans condemn Russians, for instance, more for being ungodly than for knowing how to make little else than vodka and caviar that can compete in international trade. But do we not emulate the communists by favoring the employment of force in education? Applying police force to education is man playing at god, that is, trying to cast others in his own fallible image.

In the United States, we have rejected the use of the police force for the purpose of determining one’s religion. Are high moral standards and improving attitudes toward one’s life and the life of others—prime objects of religion —of less value than knowing how to read or to write or to add two and two? Indeed, are not both education and religion intimately personal matters, one as much as the other? Is the education of another any more of my or your business than the religion of another?

In many countries—certainly in the U.S.A.—the idea of (1) being compelled by government to attend churches, or (2) having the government dictate clergymen’s subject matter, or (3) having the expenses of religious institutions forcibly collected by the tax man, would be an affront to the citizens’ intelligence. Why do people believe in applying police force to education and letting religion rest on self-determination? Logically, there appears to be no basis for the distinction. Tradition, custom—living with a mistake so long that reason is rarely brought to bear—may be the explanation.

Being a disbeliever in the management by the police force of any creative activity, I have on countless occasions asked individuals in various occupational levels if they would let their children go uneducated were all governmental compulsions removed. The answers given me have always been in the same vein. If you will try this yourself, you will be impressed with how alike the answers are: “Do you think I am a fool? I would no more let my children go without an education than I would let them go without shoes and stockings. BUT some forms of compulsion are necessary, for there are many persons who do not have the same concern for their children as I have.”

And there you have it! Police force is never needed to manage my education, only necessary for the other fellow! The other fellow’s weakness—the possibility of his having no interest in himself or in his offspring—is far more imaginary than real. It is, for the most part, a fiction of the compulsory, collectivistic myth. Should you doubt this, try to find that rare exception, “the other fellow.” If every parent in this country were to consider authoritarianism in education as applying only to himself and could divorce from his thinking the “incompetency of others,” there would be no police force applied to American education. Let any reader of this thesis, regardless of wealth status, honestly try this exercise and arrive at any other conclusion!

A Parental Responsibility

A child, from the time of birth until adulthood, is but the extension of the parent’s responsibility. The child can no more be “turned out to pasture” for his education than for his morals or his manners or his sustenance. The primary parental responsibility for the child’s education cannot properly be shifted to anyone else; responsible parenthood requires that some things remain for one’s own attentions, no matter how enticingly and powerfully specialization and division of labor may beckon one. And, the education of one’s children is a cardinal case in point.

This does not mean parents should not have help—a lot of specialized assistance—with their educational responsibility. It does mean that the parent cannot be relieved of the educational responsibility without injury to himself—that is, without injury to his own person and thus to the child who is but the extension of his personal responsibility.

According to the premise on which all of my own positions are based, man’s highest purpose in life is the unfolding of his own personality, the realization, as nearly as possible, of his creative potential, that is, his emergence, his hatching, his becoming. Such achievement presupposes that the educational process will go on through all of adulthood, as well as during childhood. Indeed, school for the child, if it is to have meaning, is but the preparation for a dynamic, continuing process of education. The test of whether or not any primary and secondary educational system is meeting the requirements of true education is: Does it set the stage for adult learning?

Police Force Interjected

How does the application of police force to education bear on this question? It tends to relieve parents of educational responsibilities, including the study that might have involved themselves. Compulsion—police force as boss—says, in effect, to the parent: “Forget about the education of your child. We, acting as government, will compel the child to go to school regardless of how you think on the matter. Do not fret unduly about what the child will study. We, the agents of compulsion, have that all arranged. And don’t worry about the financing of education. We, the personnel of authority, will take the fruits of the labor of parents and childless alike to pay the expenses. You, the parent, are to be relieved of any choice as to these matters; just leave it to the police force.”

Second, these police force devices falsely earmark the educational period. They say, ever so compellingly, that the period of education is the period to which the compulsion applies. The ceremonies of “graduation”—diplomas and licenses—if not derivatives of this system, are consistent with it. Government education is resulting in young folks coming out of school thinking of themselves as educated and concluding that the beginning of earning is the end of learning. If any devotee of government education will concede that learning ought to continue throughout all of life, he should, to be consistent, insist on compulsion for adults as well as for children—for the octogenarian as well as for the teenager. The system that is supposed to give all an equal start in life tends to put an end to learning just at the time when the spirit of inquiry should begin its most meaningful growth.2

A Faith in Freedom

It was stated above that no one could know what would happen were there to be no more police-force-as-boss in education. That assertion is correct concerning specifics and details, but there are generalizations which can be confidently predicted. For instance, one knows that creative energies would be released; that latent potential energies would turn to flowing, moving, power-giving, kinetic energies and activities. Creative thought on education would manifest itself in millions of individuals. Such genius as we potentially and compositely possess would assert itself and take the place of deadening restraints. Any person who understands the free market knows, without any qualification whatsoever, that there would be more education and better education. And a person with a faith in free men is confident that the cost per unit of learning accomplished would be far less. For one thing, there wouldn’t be any police boss to pay for. Nor would there be the financial irresponsibility that characterizes those who spend other people’s money. The free market is truly free.3

Not only is this faith in uninhibited, creative human energy rationally justified, but also there is evidence aplenty to confirm it. In other words, this faith is supported both theoretically and pragmatically. Except in the minds of those who are temperamentally slaves—those who seek a shepherd and a sheep dog, those who are ideologically attuned to authoritarianism—there does not exist a single creative activity now being conducted by man in voluntary action that could be improved by subjecting it to the police-force-as-boss. But put any one of these activities, now voluntarily conducted, under government control, leave it there for a short period, and general opinion would soon hold that the activity could not be conducted voluntarily.

A couple of decades from now, after the electric power industry has been nationalized for a few years—a likely event if present trends continue—there will be only a few people in America who will favor a return to private ownership and operation. The vast majority will not understand how that activity could exist without police-force-as-boss and still serve the people. For confirmation of this point, reflect again on the many people today who believe that the relatively simple matter of mail delivery could not be left to the free market without resulting in chaos.

It is a separation from reality, a blindness to the enormous evidence in support of freedom—like being unaware of our autonomic nervous system and its importance—that accounts for much of our loss of faith in the productivity of an educational system relieved of restraints and compulsions. The restraints, be it remembered, are in the form of taxes—the taking away of the wherewithal to finance one’s own educational plan. The compulsions are in the form of forced attendance and dictated curricula.

Several aids to the restoration of a faith in free market education are:

1. Observe activities not yet socialized—that is, not conducted by police-force-as-boss—and how satisfied we are with free market operation. And also note that people fare better in countries that are more free than in countries that are less free —without exception!

2. What is there which we know how to do, and for which there is an effective demand, which remains undone in America? Not a thing except that which police force restricts. There are many thousands of individuals expert in educational techniques.

Effective demand? Can anyone argue plausibly that there can be education of those who do not want it? The answer is the same as to the question, “What can anyone force another to learn?” You can push a pupil into a classroom, but you can’t make him think. Those who want education—and they can never get it if they do not want it—will have education. Authoritarianism is antagonistic to the extremely sensitive spirit of inquiry, the will to learn. Remove all police-force-as-boss, and we remove education’s chief obstacle.

3. While one cannot know of the brilliant steps that would be taken by millions of education-conscious parents were they and not the government to have the educational responsibility, one can imagine the great variety of cooperative and private enterprises that would emerge. There would be thousands of private schools, large and small, not necessarily unlike some of the ones we now have. There would be tutoring arrangements of a variety and ingenuity impossible to foresee. No doubt there would be both profit-making and charitably financed institutions of chain store dimensions, dispensing reading, writing, and arithmetic at bargain prices. There would be competition, which is cooperation’s most useful tool.4 There would be alertness of parents as to what the market would have to offer. There would be a keen, active, parental responsibility for their children’s and their own growth. Socialism would be explained but seldom advocated in the classroom. The free market, by its nature, would rule out such waste and extravagance. Competition for the educational dollar would attend to that.

4. Let your imagination take you back to 1900. Suppose someone had been able to conjure up a picture of a 1964 automobile with all of its wonderful performances. And suppose you had been asked how it could have been made. You could not even have grasped such a miracle, let alone have described how to make it. Yet, it has been produced, and without police-force-as-boss. Indeed, what would the 1964 car be like if the government had compelled attendance at research laboratories, dictated the subjects to be explored and the wonders to be invented, and forcibly collected the funds for the undertaking?5

Bear in mind that millions of unobstructed man-hours of ever-improving skills and thought, in a constant and complex free exchange process and with a strict attention to millions of individual judgments, have made the 1964 car so useful to so many people. And so it would be with free market education. We cannot foretell what would happen if free men were responsible for this activity; that is, if as much creative, uninhibited thought—in response to consumer wants—were put into education as has been put into motor cars.

As it is, a vast majority of the people have given little more than cursory thought as to how to educate without employing police-force-as-boss. No wonder! We have the tendency not to think about problems not our own, about activities pre-empted by government. Remove the obstacles of coercion and the potential energy of man will approach realization. Police-force-as-boss as an effective means to the educational end is but a superstition. It has no foundation in fact.

5. The children of the poor? They obtained food and clothing prior to our practice of governmental alms—more than ever available before. But education isn’t as important as shoes and stockings? Education is only as important as life itself. Johnnie couldn’t get a job as truck driver unless able to read street signs or bills of lading. Furthermore, remove the taxes we are now paying for present governmental interventions—including education—and poor parents will not be as poor. And literally millions of Americans would like nothing better than voluntarily to finance the education of children of those who might be in unfortunate circumstances.

Some, of course, will counter with the notion that receiving such charity is degrading, an unforgivable socialistic cliché.6 No one argues that voluntary giving is degrading; all consider giving as a brotherly act. Does not giving presuppose a recipient? Can giving be brotherly and receiving degrading? True, perhaps charity isn’t as agreeable to a recipient as self-financing, but is it not more agreeable than police grants-inaid?

If government were out of education as its boss—100 per cent—and if we had only free market education, no child in America would be denied an education any more than any child is presently denied religious instruction or shoes and stockings.

The Tendency Toward Anarchy

While the above case for free market education is good enough for me, I confess to a practical dilemma. Regardless of the attempts throughout history to limit police force to its role of keeping the peace—a societal guard, so to speak—it has always gotten out of hand. Sooner or later, in every instance, the role has been shifted from guard to boss of the citizenry, that is, from people service to people control; protector turned predator, one might say! So sad is the record of limitation that some persons throw up their hands in despair, incorrectly concluding that if limitation has never been maintained, it, therefore, is forever impossible. They begin to disbelieve even in government as peace keeper, insisting on no government at all; they become what might be called philosophical anarchists.

The reason for unsuccessful limitation is that too few individuals have ever understood the price that must be paid for limitation. The price is far more than writing a Constitution and a Bill of Rights with their proscriptions against governmental excesses, and designing a government of checks and balances. The price is the resurrection of what has become a bromide into a living, dynamic performance: eternal vigilance.

This performance is in the form of an achievement in understanding (1) the nature of government, (2) its uniqueness as police force, and (3) the limited competence of, as well as the absolute necessity for, police force—an understanding to be learned, mastered, and remembered by at least enough persons to form an effective leadership in each new generation. This performance is a personal, day-in and day-out requirement, meaning that it cannot be delegated to others, much less to our forefathers; it can never be relegated to the past tense; it is a continuing imperative of each new moment, without end.

The dilemma is this: The understanding of police-force-as-guard will, obviously, never be advanced but only retarded when the police-force-as-boss is put in the educational driver’s seat. Thus, unless a breakthrough is achieved by an individual here and there, capable of independent analysis and unafraid of parting company with the mores, the most important aspect of education for responsible citizenship will go unattended.

The myth of government education, in our country today, is an article of general faith. To question the myth is to tamper with the faith, a business that few will read about or listen to or calmly tolerate. In short, for those who would make the case for educational freedom as they would for freedom in religion, let them be warned that this is a first-rate obstacle course. But heart can be taken in the fact that the art of becoming is composed of acts of overcoming. And becoming is life’s prime purpose; becoming is, in fact, enlightenment—self-education, its own reward.

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