Do you still support free, compulsory government schooling after reading this information?
Excerpt… [Read more from Gary North here.]
Gary North’s Reality Check – September 3, 2010
Communism for Conservatives
Three of the ten planks of the “Communist Manifesto” (1848) are still universally accepted. …
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
The ten planks were supposed to be the means of ushering in the classless society of Communism. The next sentence after plank #10 revealed the utopianism of Marxism: “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.”
Classes did not go away in the Communist paradises. There were the haves and the have-nots. The basis of access into the minority class of the haves was through membership in the Communist Party. The state never went away. It got stronger and more demanding. It became more pervasive.
Today, the Communist paradises are gone, except for Cuba and North Korea. They have all officially abandoned Communism as an ideology. Yet they all maintain their commitment to the three planks. Why? Because these three planks constitute the Promised Land of the entire world. There is no nation in which these three planks are not operative, at least on paper. …
Tax-funded educational systems are universal. The vast majority of all students are taught in these schools. In most European nations, attendance is compulsory. Only in the last 25 years have home schooling families in the United States gained a semblance of liberty from the local school boards. Some states remain tyrannical. The Home School Legal Defense Association still has lots of families to defend.
So, in these three areas of life, the vast majority of those voters who think of themselves as conservatives still cling to the tenets of Communism. They think nothing of this. They are 30% down the path to Communism, and they don’t know it, or just don’t care. The ex-Communist paradises are 30% Communist and have no intention of becoming less Communist. So, Marx and Engels got 30% of their program accepted by the bourgeoisie world. …
ONE-THIRD COMMUNIST
How is it that virtually the whole world has adopted one-third of a program that was so revolutionary in early 1848 that Marx and Engels did not put their names on the original German edition of their famous manifesto? One word: power. People want to get other people to think the way they do. They want them to do what they instruct them to do. The love of power is universal.
The voters think they can control what is taught in the public schools. Voters think that the textbooks will reflect their values. They think that the teachers will be recruited from their group. They will hold the hammer. They also think, “Those lower sorts will not pay for their children’s educations. Their children have a right to become more like us. This means that they should stop being like their parents. The schools will force those parents to comply.”
It’s all about “those sorts of people.” It’s also about “our sort of people.” C.S. Lewis put these words into the mouth of a ruthless character in his 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength”: “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of all the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones taken charge of. Quite.”
A decade before Marx and Engels penned their anonymous little book, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun its experiment in tax-funded compulsory education. It abolished tax funding of Congregational churches in 1832. Before the decade was over, it had begun financing a new priesthood. No one saw the irony of this at the time. Few have seen it since then.
Opposition to this or that aspect of the public schools is a waste of time. The reforms come and go, but the system remains intact.
By 1900, the system was universal in the United States. It had spread to much of the West. After World War I, it was universal in the West. …
THE BUREAUCRATS INHERIT
A strange thing happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The bureaucrats began to take over the pools of wealth and power. In the United States, beginning in the 1880s, Civil Service reform began being extended. The Republicans feared the threat of a clean sweep politically, now that the Democrats were beginning to have a shot at local political offices. So, they pushed for the creation of tenured jobs that would be available only to people who passed exams. This immunized them from changes in politics.
In every Western nation, this system spread. Bureaucrats thwarted democracy. That was why the systems were set up: to guarantee that “our sort of people” maintained control over the implementation of rules. They write the rules. In the United States, “The Federal Register” publishes 77,000 pages of fine print rules every year. It adds up!
This has led to a new system of law: administrative law. Civil servants in the executive decide what rulers will implement which laws. They decide the rules of the game. They write the rules to serve the desires of the bureaucrats. …
When a bureaucracy fails spectacularly and in full public view, the political appointee who officially runs it is replaced. Then the agency asks Congress for more money, so that a similar mistake does not take place. Congress forks over the money. FEMA is still operating. Brownie is long gone. Such is the iron law of bureaucracy.
The bureaucrats need only two things to persevere: (1) guaranteed income; (2) a stream of replacements educated by bureaucrats. In short, they need only planks 5 and 10 of the “Communist Manifesto.” …
Yep. Those tenants are in the Communist Manifesto. Damn those Reds — wait, isn’t the cold war over? Wasn’t that The Americans?
Right; so you talk about how everyone wants other people to think like them — fair enough — but be careful about how much you admonish a group for that, since you’ve clearly outlined it as part of your own agenda. It seems to me, however, that this disapproval over who gets to teach and what isn’t about the idea of making people think like you, it’s that you believe that your group is disproportionately unrepresented. What if that isn’t the case?
I certainly won’t waste any breath trying to defend the shortcomings of bureaucracy — it’s really just the best we’ve managed so far, that doesn’t make it particularly outstanding — it’s clear here that you’re much more interested in implying that ‘those damned commies’ are ruining our world. I’d try to show you that you’re wrong, with studies that have shown that many of the most Socialist countries in the world are the happiest and longest lived, but I imagine you believe that’s propaganda, so why bother.