Education: Free and Compulsory

It is a grave and unanswerable indictment of compulsory state education that these modern totalitarianisms were eager to institute compulsory state schooling in their regimes. Indeed, the indoctrination of the youth in their schools was one of the chief mainstays of these slave-states. As a matter of fact, the chief difference between the twentieth-century horrors and the older despotisms is that the present ones have had to rest on mass support more directly, and that therefore compulsory literacy and indoctrination have been crucial. The compulsory state system already developed was grist for the totalitarian mill.32 At the base of totalitarianism and compulsory education is the idea that children belong to the State rather than to their parents. One of the leading promoters of that idea in Europe was the famous Marquis de Sade, who insisted that children are the property of the State.

There is no need to dwell on education in Communist countries. Communist countries impose compulsory state schooling, and enforce rigid indoctrination of obedience to the rulers. The compulsory schooling is supplemented by State monopolies on other propaganda and educational fields.

Similarly, National Socialist education subordinated the individual to the State and enforced obedience. Education belonged exclusively to the National Socialist state for indoctrination in its principles.

A similar use of state schools and indoctrination for obedience to the absolute State was employed in Fascist Italy. Italy is particularly interesting for the activities of the first Fascist Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile. For in lax old Italy, education had stressed the intellectual development of the individual child and his learning of subjects. Gentile’s Fascist regime instituted the methods of modern “progressive education.” He introduced and emphasized manual work, singing, drawing, and games. Attendance was enforced by fines. Significantly, Gentile taught that “education must be achieved through experience, it must be achieved through action.”33 The children were free to learn through their own experiences, of course “within the limits necessary for development of culture. “Curricula were therefore not prescribed, but children were free to do as they wanted, with the only emphasis of study placed on “the study of heroes such as Mussolini as symbols of the national spirit.”34

• 32See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1952), pp. 63 — 64.
• 33The similarity to John Dewey’s dictum of “learning by doing” is obvious. This will be discussed below. See Franklin L. Burdette, “Politics and Education,” pp. 410 — 23, esp. 419, in Twentieth Century Political Thought, ed. J. Roucek (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).
• 34 See, among others, H.W. Schneider and S.B. Clough, Making Fascists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); George F. Kneller, The Educational Philosophy of National Socialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941); Walter Lando, “Basic Principles of National Socialist Education,” Education for Dynamic Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937); Howard R. Marraro, The New Education in Italy (New York: S.F. Vauni, 1936); Albert P. Pinkevitch, The New Education in the Soviet Republic (New York: John Day Company, 1929). Also of interest is Edward H. Riesner, Nationalism and Education Since 1789: A Social and Political History of Modern Education (New York: Mamillan, 1922) for background.