Freedom in One Lesson

75.

Nuclear Giants and Ethical Infants

It is commonplace to hear about how much more we know than our ancestors. Many have long taken that to imply that we are more advanced than they were or that the accumulation of knowledge will continue to improve (or progress, if you claim to be a progressive) over time. But while that is undeniable in some areas, the opposite might be true in others. We may have regressed in more important ways than we have progressed.

Leonard Read makes this important but often overlooked argument in “Nuclear Giants and Ethical Infants” (Read 1964d), from the August 1964 issue of The Freeman. His insights about the state of our knowledge and America’s educational system deserve to be recalled, given how coercive and controversial education is today.

[We have] a superfluity of technical know-how relative to general wisdom or understanding . . . a dangerous and grotesque imbalance. . . .

. . . Our educational emphasis is more on accumulating know-how than on gaining wisdom or understanding. . . . We have know-how galore. . . .

But where is the understanding to balance the knowhow? . . . Are we not, as a nation, on the same reckless course that has brought about the fall of one civilization after another? Self-responsibility—amidst an abundance of know-how and a paucity of wisdom, understanding, conscience, ethics, insight—has given way to government responsibility for our security, welfare, and prosperity. . . .

Unwisely, we increase the curbs on individual initiative. . . . The directive of one’s behavior is less and less what conscience dictates as right. . . . A rapidly expanding knowhow, unless balanced by a commensurately expanding wisdom, assuredly spells disaster.

What kind of wisdom is Read referring to here? Because people are different in many ways, the key to a more moral or ethical society is individual integrity, or “fidelity to one’s highest conscience,” subject to our common “moral obligation not to impair the life, livelihood, or liberty of others.” Such wisdom requires that individuals exercise their own decisions about how best to live rather than having decisions imposed on them by some collective determination.

The first stage of wisdom requires that we understand the virtues and how to live them. Integrity, that is, fidelity to one’s highest conscience, is foremost and basic. . . . . . . Note the millions of individuals who actually believe that the rest of us would fare better were we a reflection of themselves. . . .

. . . [Consider] only two individuals, you and me. . . . I know more about myself than anyone else does . . . [and] you know yourself better than I know you.

. . . You and I are not alike. . . . My aptitudes, faculties, potentialities, likes and dislikes, yearnings, inhibitions, ambitions, capabilities and inabilities to learn about this or that, are not at all like yours. As to our common ground, each of us has a moral obligation not to impair the life, livelihood, or liberty of others. Beyond this . . . we are at variance in every particularity.

What does this have to do with our schools? It goes to the very heart of seeking wisdom.

Examine my possible educational relationships to you. . . . The proper role is to let you draw on such know-how and understanding as I may possess and as you may determine. Education is a seeking, probing, taking-from process and the initiative must rest with the seeker. . . . Your progress depends on your desire to learn. . . . Mine is, at best, only an exemplar’s role: it is to improve myself to the utmost and thus to persuade solely by precept and example. . . .

. . . When you are at liberty to glean from me or any others as you may choose, . . . you will gravitate in due course toward that balance of know-how and wisdom needed for the fulfillment distinctive to your own person. . . .

My second possible role is that of demigod. . . . I shall compel your (or your children’s) classroom attendance, write your curriculum in accord with my notions of your needs and force it upon you and, lastly, I shall coercively extort the financial wherewithal from all and sundry to defray the costs of imposing my own peculiar brand of knowledge upon you. . . .

. . . The approach of the demigod . . . is antagonistic to the advancement of wisdom. . . .

. . . Coercion . . . is, by definition, repressive and destructive. . . . Acquiring understanding or wisdom springs from the volitional faculty. . . .

. . . If . . . the forcible casting of you (or your children) in my image is wrong . . . government schooling . . . is precisely the same thing, except on the grand scale.

Someone might well object to such a claim: “Surely you don’t believe our massive public expenditures on education produce nothing of value” (as if that was the relevant standard). But even to that misdirecting question, Read has an interesting response. A great deal of first-rate education goes on in our government school systems; but . . . in spite of, not because of, the coercive or governmental aspects. Untold millions of teachers and students, in many of their day-to-day relationships, are on a voluntary, not a coercive basis; to a large extent the students are selecting their teachers. But wherever coercion insinuates itself into schooling . . . an imbalance of know-how and wisdom will become evident. Wisdom will decrease, not increase.

Read argues that government intrusion into education is at the heart of our “imbalance of know-how and wisdom.” The justification for this intrusion is the false premise that an appropriate education must be imposed because people cannot be trusted to choose for themselves.

Billions of dollars are forcibly collected from all of us— limiting our individual pursuits—and used to pay for government’s know-how pursuits. . . . Compulsion—government intervention in the educational market—accounts, in no small measure, for the imbalance of know-how and wisdom.

. . . We have many private educational institutions. . . . But so-called private institutions in a statist society are not . . . free market in character. . . . They are licensed and regulated and increasingly financed by their statist “competition.” . . . Education is preponderantly statist . . . [and] so much of the nation’s resources are converted to know-how pursuits. . . .

. . . Inquire how we in the U.S.A. got off on the wrong foot. . . .

History reveals the original “reasoning” to have been somewhat as follows: America is to be a haven for free men. To accomplish this, we must have a people’s, not a tyrant’s government. However, such a democratic plan will never work unless the people are educated. But free citizens, left to their own resources, will not accomplish their intellectual upbringing. Therefore, “we” must educate “them”: compulsory attendance in school, government dictated curricula, forcible collection to defray the costs.

. . . Imagine: We will insure freedom to “the people” by denying freedom to them in education, for if their education is entrusted to freedom they will remain uneducated and, thus, will not be able to enjoy the blessings of freedom!

Can we recover the wisdom that has been lost to coercive education?

How can we ever expect a people brought up on coercion to be free of demigod mentalities? Does a coercive educational system have the intellectual soil and climate where freedom and wisdom may flourish? . . .

. . . [We have] hooked up coercion to the spirit of inquiry . . . [but] any light coercion produces is not in the form of wisdom.

Once on this coercive trek toward . . . know-how in everything and understanding in nothing . . . you and I and others need to recover from our demigod pose . . . to reject compulsion and to accept liberty in education. How . . . can a people be free or wise unless they are brought up in, steeped in, believe in, and understand that growth in wisdom presupposes freedom of the individual to pursue what is wise?

Read followed up “Nuclear Giants and Ethical Infants” with “The Case for the Free Market in Education” (Read 1964c), from the September 1964 issue of The Freeman. In the essay, he argues that freedom is justified in education no less than in logic and history.

Remove the police force—government as boss—and education is restored to the free, competitive market. . . .

. . . 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 yours or anyone else’s income for schooling. This, it must be emphasized, is the free market assumption. . . .

. . . [Ask people] if they would let their children go uneducated were all governmental compulsions removed. . . . “I would no more let my children go without an education than I would let them go without shoes and stockings.” . . .

. . . Were there to be no more police-force-as-boss in education . . . [then, as] any person who understands the free market knows . . . there would be more education and better education. . . .

It is a . . . blindness to the enormous evidence in support of freedom . . . that accounts for much of the lost faith in educational productiveness were the educational system relieved of restraints and compulsions. . . .

Those who want education . . . will have education. . . . Remove all police-force-as-boss, and we remove education’s chief obstacle.

Americans are highly dissatisfied with their educational systems. Controversies rage over the 1619 Project, critical race theory, attempts to incorporate “social justice” into math, and much more. For Leonard Read, such problems derive from government’s coercive involvement. If we replace the perpetually disappointing faith in force, “education’s chief obstacle,” with Read’s faith in freedom, we can bring about a world with more wisdom and less controversy over what educational material self-identified demigods should force on others. That sounds like a win-win situation to me.