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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:05
The Truth About School: Another Brick in the Wall!
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Hi, everybody.
My name is Stephan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
You can find out more at freedomainradio.com or YouTube slash free domain radio.
So we're going to talk about public schools today.
This is one of these great topics that really connect us all together.
Almost all of us have gone through government schools for internally what felt like a couple of millennia.
I myself was started in private school.
I started in government schools very early and then from six onwards for a couple of years I was in a private boarding school and then I was in government schools in England and Canada and then went to university in Toronto and Montreal.
And I think a lot of us have had similar kinds of experiences.
I was thinking about this just before doing the presentation.
What was my, not most vivid, but the memory that I have of government schools that encapsulated my experience.
And I remember when I was in grade seven, It was one of the first couple of days back in school in September and I grew up very very poor and when your family is broke summers are kinda lengthy.
I mean I worked but also it was just, you know, you've got no money, it's tough to do stuff that's entertaining, spend a lot of time in the library and so on.
And this is back in the days before the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Cold War was Raging and we feared vaporization.
There was this journal of the atomic scientists, I think, that kept saying we're two minutes to midnight for the extinction of all life on the planet, which did not crank up your motivation to study algebra.
But anyway, I remember going to the washroom, sitting on the toilet, and someone had written on the wall, you know, you're sitting in this Soviet prison-style gulag toilet, with graffiti all around you.
And someone had written, mutate now before the post-war rush.
And I just thought, oh man, this is a kind of hell.
Hell is absence, is emptiness.
It's not necessarily the stimulation of pain or opposition.
And It was so boring and there's a reason why it's so boring.
There's a reason why it all feels so futile.
I felt old and I've never felt as old ever since as I did when I was in school.
I felt old.
I felt controlled.
I felt bored, but afraid, which is a really terrible combination.
And, um, I was pretty lucky as far as bullying went.
There was only one incident that not even an incident, but one threat really over the course.
I was a fairly quick witted guy.
A good athlete.
And so I was mostly okay as far as bullying went, but the teachers just seemed like petty children.
If that makes any sense.
They did not seem to me to be admirable with one or two exceptions.
There was a woman who read, I was writing a novel when I was 12.
She read it to the class as it was going along, which was very nice.
There was another guy in grade six who cared about knowledge and who said things that I remember to this day.
But the great tragedy, of course, I think for most of us when it comes to schooling, and I know this is a stay-at-home dad, children love to learn.
They love to learn.
To take out the joy of learning for children is a pretty deep appendectomy.
You have to really shred significant portions of their soul, so to speak, in order to remove the love of learning.
It's sort of like children battle hard to learn how to roll over, how to crawl, how to walk, how to speak, and they just love to learn.
For me, the love of learning, when I was doing my masters, it really began to come back, but the love of learning was not at all encouraged.
In fact, it was strongly discouraged when it came to government schools, particularly anything that had any real value or depth or ethics.
Those topics, and we'll get into why in a moment, we're just discouraged.
And of course, there is this, you know, horizontal slave-on-slave violence that seems to be endemic to government schools in particular, where there is a soulless spiraling down to the lowest common denominator, the most disturbed and empathy-less children or young adults in the environment tend to pull down the social discourse to their level.
And there is a lot of, you know, the tall poppy syndrome, the poppy that sticks up is the The nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered down.
And there is a desire to blend you into a faceless fish egg style tapioca of undifferentiated uniformity.
And if you've ever watched Pink Floyd's excellent movie, The Wall, you can see what I mean.
So let's get into why is it the way that it is?
What else could it look like?
Could there not be a sunflower of mind and heart opening of childhood?
The glorious anarchy of childhood as it's been described.
Could it not be more like that?
Was it ever like that?
And why did it change?
You will be fascinated by the truth about public schools.
Now, for those in England, these mean government schools, and I'll try to remember to use that term.
Aristotle said, if you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
That is very important.
So we're going to focus on the West for the most part.
And we'll start with ancient Greece, as so many things in history tend to.
Schools in ancient Greece were generally private and voluntary.
But there was an exception in the ancient Greek world, which was compulsory schooling in the militaristic city-state of Sparta.
Sparta was a very militaristic, very fascistic city-state as opposed to still slave-dependent but slightly more gentle and egalitarian and philosophical Athens.
And the conflict between Athens and Sparta is one of the foundational conflicts in Western history.
You could really say Plato is Sparta and Aristotle is democracy.
So Spartan boys back in the day were forcibly taken from their mothers at the age of seven and they were sent to public school for 12 years until they were 19 to become citizens who were, and I quote, obedient to the word of command, capable of enduring hardships and victories in battle.
And they all had to talk like this.
And, um, These descriptions of this kind of government schooling are available through history and through literature.
Plato, who is an admirer of Spartan culture, had considerable influence over the development of public education theory, and in his famous dialogue, The Laws, he wrote, quote, There shall be compulsory education, and the pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the state rather than to their parents.
Now human beings, we in print, we're like ducklings doing those experiments where they put an orange balloon in front of ducklings.
And the ducklings just follow the balloon.
We imprint, like just about every species that has relationships with its parents, we imprint on those who raise us.
And governments kind of raise us these days, which is why nationalism is so strong and why if you talk about alternatives to particular government solutions, people think that you're like emotionally, it sort of hits them like you're banishing their parents or something.
Plato also envisioned a minister of education whose influence was crucial in his dictatorship.
He wrote, of all the great offices of state, this is the greatest, the minister of education.
Now this shifted in the Roman Empire.
Education was generally private and a voluntary matter.
As the Roman philosopher Cicero noted, quote, our ancestors did not wish that children should be educated by fixed rules determined by the laws publicly promulgated and made uniform for all.
And in many ways the Roman Empire was more free, certainly more free than Sparta and more free than certain elements of the Greek city-states.
Now, not much is known about the Dark Ages and not much formal education outside of the monasteries was occurring.
The European Middle Ages and early modernity, there was no such thing as compulsory state-run systems of education.
There was instead a network of private institutions and the great thing with private institutions is that they have to satisfy The values and requirements of the parents.
This is so fundamental and foundational.
Why can't you talk about anything really important in a government school?
Like the existence of deities, like what is morality, what is justice, what is truth, what is virtue, the things that kids are really fascinated in.
Instead you just get this general buckshot of useless trivia.
When was the war of 1812?
The British North American Act!
Oh man, it's brutal and it's just a series of rote, dull memorization because government schools cannot afford to offend because they cannot select students by the values of their parents.
And so when you have mixed values in a community, when they all get together in school, you don't end up with a stimulating debate of contrary values, you end up with anything of any importance being scrubbed from the curriculum.
And so nobody's going to be offended if you learn when the Declaration of Independence was published.
But if you start going more deeply into values that may offend certain parents, then you end up in trouble.
You end up with problems, with complaints, with so on.
So this is one of the foundational reasons as to why You simply cannot have anything of foundation or importance or interest being taught in public schools.
It's just a series of brain stringing out nonsense.
Of course, in the maths and sciences less so.
No values to offend people in there in general, although there is of course conflict with regards to evolution in certain countries, particularly the United States.
In the Middle Ages and early modernity, wealthy families would hire tutors.
And you can see this all over the place in literature, governesses and so on.
The children of commoners attended Latin schools.
Of course, you needed to learn the Latin language.
Up until the 15th century, it was impossible, pretty much, to get the Bible in the vernacular.
It was in Latin or Greek, or I suppose Hebrew, but until Martin Luther came along and translated the Bible into the vernacular with the Creation of the printing press.
Westerners had the capacity to actually read the Bible for themselves, which is one of the things that took a hammer to the fragile ice glass of Catholic Christendom.
In the 15th century, of course, increased literacy, the invention of the printing press, there was a hunger.
Because when you went to Mass earlier on, the Mass was in Latin.
If you didn't speak Latin, you just didn't know what was going on.
So people wanted to read the Bible and, of course, other works for themselves.
So entrepreneurs, to meet this rising demand for literacy, they founded schools for writing and arithmetic and by the 16th century these schools emerged in most villages and cities throughout Europe.
And there were charity schools in England which were funded through donations and provided free or low-cost education to poor children.
This is my model.
You call it a business model?
I guess you could.
But my model is to Release everything that I have learned and everything that I can create and all of the experts that I can have conversations with and all the debates I can engage in.
Release them without cost and ask people to support through donations.
And people say to me, well, you know, if there weren't government schools, how would the poor be educated?
It's like, well, I'm educating people for free or at least just asking for voluntary donations.
What are you doing?
It's always the people who aren't doing anything who ask how anything will be done.
Now, this was a big challenge.
Of course, in the 16th century with Francis Bacon, you saw the rise of the scientific method.
Now, the scientific method was not wildly new.
It wasn't just invented in the 16th century.
Aristotle said that evidence trumps theory.
And of course one of the foundations of the scientific method is your theory must be internally consistent but must be validated by the evidence.
And if there's a conflict between theory and evidence, evidence always wins.
This is a challenge to religiosity because in religiosity you have a theory or you have a belief system that is non-empirical.
That there's no evidence for the soul, there's no physical evidence for deities, there's no physical evidence for miracles, and so on.
And so, in the religious mindset, it is the theory that trumps sense evidence.
Sense evidence must be degraded in order to maintain the perfection of the theory, which is again a straight line back to Platonism.
Plato believed that the reason we were able to look at a chair and know that it was a chair to have concepts was because before we were born we were floating in this Sandra Bullock inhabited ether floating around the world and we saw all of these perfect chairs and perfect pencils and perfect tables and that's how we knew what they were.
And the theory in Plato trumps evidence, whereas in Aristotelian tradition it is the evidence that trumps the theory.
So this was the beginning of the conflict.
The expansion of hitherto under-stimulated conflict between science and religion.
Does the theory bow to the evidence or does the evidence bow to the theory?
This began to chip away the authority of the church, the rise of science and of course the rediscovery of the ancient Greek texts, the philosophical texts which survived the tragic fire in the library of Alexandria which still makes me sad to this day.
But the ancient texts were resurrected and people began to read about non-christian virtuous brilliant people and the question of did Socrates go to hell because he was born Before Jesus?
Well, that's an important question.
So these all began to chip away at the authority of the church in the Middle Ages in Europe.
Martin Luther scornfully wrote, quote, The common man does not think that he is under the obligation to God and the world to send his son to school.
Everyone thinks that he is free to bring up his son as he pleases, no matter what becomes of God's word and command.
And so this was a challenge.
There were new floods of books and the Bible in the vernacular spreading out.
to the population as a whole who began to ask questions.
There was the success of science.
There was the challenge of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, circles within circles, because circles are perfect and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And there was a challenge to the Earth-centered model of the solar system with the Sun-centered model of the solar system.
Lots of things chipping away at what was considered to be settled science or settled dogma in the side of religion.
This was a great challenge.
So, when you can't win an argument, what do you want to do?
If you find yourself losing an argument, if the evidence starts stacking against you and the data rises irrefutably like a tsunami to take out your tiny village of superstition, what do you do?
Why?
You indoctrinate the young, so that you can frighten them into not asking the questions that you cannot answer.
So Luther understood that Religion as it stood was no longer going to be uncritically accepted, so he felt that if Christianity and of course Lutheranism was to survive, it would have to be forced onto people.
He was responding to concerns surrounding the decline of church-run schools, so he wrote a letter titled, To the councilmen of all cities in Germany that they establish and maintain Christian schools.
In the letter he argued, and I quote, If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and to perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it the right to the people to send their children to school?
Because in this case we are warring with the devil.
And his project to restore religion by enforcing religious instruction in schools was a huge success, according to historian James Van Horn Melton.
I will put all of the links below for the sources.
Town councils throughout Germany issued these rulings that required private schools to teach religion, essentially transforming them, quote, from purely utilitarian institutions into centers of religious indoctrination.
Now, once religious sects, religious groups, begin to unite their power with the state, once the state, once the government has the power to enforce religious doctrine on, particularly on children, it becomes almost inevitable that you're going to get religious warfare, religious civil warfare.
Because each religion, each religious sect, wishes to gain the power of the state to impose its values on children in particular.
And so Martin Luther by bringing government into education then made it essential for various religious sects to wage war to attempt to gain control of the government because then it became win-lose.
The government indoctrination of children was so powerful that you either gained control of that power as a religion or you faded into irrelevancy.
And throughout the 16th century and the 17th century Religious wars just decimated Europe in ways that, you know, we can't really even fathom.
I mean, we know about the Black Death, where up to a third of the population died in the 13th, 14th centuries.
It came back a number of times.
But, and we know about the Inquisition and so on, but we don't really know that much about the degree of religious warfare that occurred for hundreds of years.
The 17th century was unbelievably brutal.
The Thirty Years War, which was 1618 to 1648, between the Protestants and the Catholics, claimed the lives, caused the slaughter of almost half of the German males in the entire country.
Half the German males in the entire country.
During this period in Germany, the modern-day equivalent of 95 million Americans died, were slaughtered, were murdered.
There was a traveler, I mentioned this on the show before, there was a traveler who was riding through Germany who said, I could scarce but see a tree without a person hanging from it, the bitter fruit of religious cross persecution to gain control of the mighty power of the state.
To stamp doctrine on the tender minds of children was everywhere.
Brutal.
Religious conflicts, persecutions, famines and diseases were wreaking havoc throughout Europe.
And there was a huge disillusionment with religion through this process, through this period.
And this is where the separation of church and state.
Why it occurred.
And it is, of course, my goal, as is the goal of all moral people, to attempt to instruct the species in reason and evidence so that you don't need, say, half of the males to be slaughtered in your country in order to realize that the separation of church and state is a mighty sensible and civilization-saving idea.
But this is where it came from.
And this is how something like the invention of the printing press, which you consider a huge boon, led to Unbelievable slaughter across, right?
Invention of the printing press means people can get their hands on texts.
They get their own hands on texts.
You get a split because everyone starts focusing on their own preferences.
The Bible is a very multifaceted document.
And so if you're a nice person, if you're gentle, then you go to turn the other cheek stuff.
If you're more vengeful, then you go to an eye for an eye.
You focus on the Old Testament.
You can find almost everything within the Bible to reflect your own personality type and your own personal preferences and your own moral preferences.
It is a little bit of a salad bar.
That's why it evolves to be contradictory so it can catch as many people as possible.
I've known very few Christians who've actually read through the whole Bible.
I actually did read through the whole Bible when I was working after high school as a gold panner and prospector.
Oh, we had some time in the evening, and I read the whole Bible, and it's really quite jaw-dropping.
I hugely recommend doing it.
And so yeah, you mentioned the printing press allows people to read for themselves, create splits within Christendom, and then every sect wishes to gain control of the power of the state once the state has the power to impose doctrine on children, which results in massive war, which results in the separation of church and state.
Who knew you could get killed by ink?
Now, in the late 18th century, after nearly a thousand years of existence, the declining and not very aptly named Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, was about to be dissolved by the advancing armies of Napoleon.
In 1806, Prussia, now known as East Germany for the most part, lost half its territory after the French crushed the outdated Prussian army in the Battle of Jena.
Now, this was very shocking to Prussia, which prided itself on this military.
So lots of German intellectuals began calling for a new moral and political order that would rebuild Prussia into a great nation.
Now, this is somewhat around the time that the idea of the world spirit was occurring, in that God chooses particular nations to enact his will across the landscape of human progress and morality and favors that.
And of course that is usually It usually is accepted as victory in battle means God's on your side, right?
So all these crazy people like George Washington and Napoleon who rode at the front of their armies at times, they weren't hit.
And then of course people thought, well, he's being protected by God, God must be on his side.
And so as you started to get nationalistic warfares really expanding across Europe, the idea that God had to be on your side was really important.
If you suffer a defeat, generally what is blamed is irreligiosity.
And therefore there must be these reformations and so on.
In his 1808 book, Address to the German Nation, the philosopher Johann Fichte infused the religious educational model with a new ideal, quote, by means of the new education we want to mold the Germans into a corporate body which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individuals and members by the same interests, which would be the interests of church and state.
So within four years, Prussia had instituted state certification of teachers and prohibited children from leaving school until they had passed a state set and state administered examination.
So this is sort of a soft fascism of the classroom.
You say, well, this is what the kids have to know in order to graduate, and this is what you have to be competent in in order to teach.
You don't have to command every teacher to do every little detail.
It's just like carving a new channel for a river and blocking off the old one.
The water will just follow that path naturally because the parents want their kids to graduate and this is what the kids have to say to graduate.
That's what they'll learn and that's what they'll say.
In 1817, Prussia mandated compulsory state education for all children between the ages of 5 and 12.
And they enrolled 80% of German children into this new education system in a span of only 30 years.
This is called the Prussian school system.
And if you think that it is only confined to the 19th century or Prussia, you are mistaken.
This was the dark and dank fascistic little chamber that you were jammed into in rows of sardine chairs.
This is the foundation of modern government education.
Now, Prussian public schools were largely modeled after the education system pioneered by an avid supporter of Martin Luther's idea, August Hermann Frank.
During the 18th century, aided by Frank's good connections with the court, Lutherans successfully lobbied for more government control over education.
Every hour of the pupil's day in Frank's schools were consigned to a prescribed activity.
And this is how the concept of free time became a separate pedagogical category for the first time in history.
I mean, you remember when you'd be working on something that was really cool, the bell rings, you move on to the next thing, put it down, now it's time.
This is not how people learn.
I mean, imagine if there was a, you were working on something at work and the bell rang and it's like the server went down and now you had to stop doing emails and you had to do something else.
I mean, it would be crazy.
But of course, school is not for the convenience or pleasure or value of children, but rather others.
Frank wrote, quote, above all it is necessary to break the natural willfulness of the child.
While the schoolmaster who seeks to make the child more learned is to be commended for cultivating the child's understanding, he has not done enough.
He has forgotten his most important task, namely that of making the child obedient.
Making the child obedient and break the natural willfulness of the child.
This, of course, goes back to the idea that for irrational ideologies, children are the enemy.
Because children are very rational, children are very skeptical, and children need evidence.
Just try giving a kid an empty iPad box and saying that there's an iPad ghost in there, and the kid will just cry.
Kid knows there's no iPad in the box.
So, children are natural skeptics and very empirical and very sense-based creatures.
And they are the natural enemies of very abstract and irrational ideologies.
And therefore, when those ideologies wish to mold the minds of children, they have to break the natural willfulness.
This is the idea that children are born sinful and must be beaten or terrorized or terrified into conformity.
Because the skepticism is the enemy of the irrational hierarchy.
The historian James Van Horn Melton wrote, Frank's schools sought to create a completely regulated and self-enclosed environment, neutralizing the impact of the outside environment, and thus ridding pupils of any bad habits they might have developed outside the institution.
Now, the birth of the modern public school system, Otto von Bismarck, not just a very, very powerful warship, but a Prussian statesman, unified Germany in a series of conquests, forming the German Empire in 1871. forming the German Empire in 1871.
By that time, school attendance was universal and compulsory in Germany.
The Prussian public schools were widely praised for their efficiency in creating factory workers and soldiers, which the two things for the military-industrial complex.
The expansion of German militarism required soldiers and workers, and that is what your schools are designed to turn you into.
A cubicle drone, a very obedient worker, and particularly for the southern US, a soldier!
That is what the Empire needs, and that is what the schools produce.
I mean, the government pays the schools to produce pupils who want give the government any trouble.
It's a factory.
If you build a car factory, you expect it to produce cars.
And if you build a compliance factory, you expect it to produce citizens.
During the 19th and early 20th century, trying to recreate the amazing growth of power in Germany, governments throughout the world began establishing mandatory public schools inspired by this Prussian model.
In 1843, Horace Mann, U.S.
Secretary of the Federal Board of Education and the father of American public education spent six weeks on a research trip to Prussia.
Mann wrote in one of his reports, quote, If Russia can pervert the benign influence of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of Republican institutions.
Oh, Boromir, nobody should get the ring.
We'll use this power for good!
How did that work out?
Progressivism, socialism, debt, fiat currency, central banking, empire.
So, of course, I mean, net neutrality is just going through, which is a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist.
It's on the verge of going through.
It was voted, I think, three to two by the unelected group.
So, whenever the government wants to take over an institution, it says that there are all of these massive problems, which usually turn out to not be the case.
Not the case.
So, in the 19th century, when everyone said, hey, let's have governments take over all the schools, well, the government should combat low literacy rates and high education costs by instituting free, as in tax-funded, public schools.
Was this at all true?
Well, no.
Literacy in the northern states in America increased from 75% to 90% between 1800 and 1840.
It increased from 75% to 90% between 1800 and 1840.
And in southern states, from 60% to 81% for the same period.
In 1850, the fine state of Massachusetts had reached a level of 98% literacy, two years before the state compulsory education law was enacted.
And listen, my friends, 19th century literacy was not the same as what is laughingly called 21st century literacy, which is apparently being able to choose the right emoticon for your misspelled rant.
These people who were the big writers in the 19th century.
Charles Dickens was a rock star, famous for his public readings of his own work and mobbed everywhere he went, deluged with mail.
He was A complete rock star.
He was the Kardashian, but with more of an etching sex tape, I would imagine.
And Herman Melville.
I mean, you just pick up Moby Dick and work your way through it.
That was an incredibly popular book.
Going further back, of course, there was Shakespeare, Samuel Dickinson, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë.
Just, I mean, amazing.
The Brontë sisters.
Amazing literature.
And this was all very popular.
And literacy was far higher, I would argue, in terms of comprehension and complexity of texts than it is now.
So 98% literacy with the political books, John Locke, Tom Paine, I mean, the Constitution, which people were expected to read and understand, the Declaration of Independence.
Anyway, there was amazing amounts of literacy back in the day.
So, 98% literacy with complex texts in Massachusetts in 1850.
2003, a study by the US Department of Education.
Only 31% of college students, sorry, only 31% of college graduates could read and draw complicated inferences from long, complex English texts.
31% of college graduates.
12 years of schooling, 3 or 4 years of a degree, That is 15 or 16 years of full-time education and less than a third can read and draw complicated inferences from English texts.
A 29% decrease in little over a decade.
So from 1993 to 2003, 29% decrease in literacy, even of college graduates.
And people say, ah, yes, well, but Shakespeare went to a government school.
That's true, but only for 12 weeks a year.
The New York Post report in 2013, quote, nearly 80% of city public high school graduates who enrolled in a city University of New York Community College last year had to relearn the basics of reading, writing, or math.
The highest percentage in years.
80% of high school graduates had to relearn the basics of reading, writing, or math.
That is horrifying.
The amount of human capital, the amount of childhood enthusiasm and love of learning and joy of mastery, it's being ground under, it's being destroyed.
This is one of the foundational reasons why the economy can't recover.
People can't think, they can't read, they live in a bubble of now and they don't know anything about where they came from for the most part.
They don't know anything about any broad trends in history that can help inform their decisions.
But that's not accidental of course.
What about the cost of schooling?
We see it was supposed to be cheaper when the government took it over.
Things only look cheaper when government takes things over because they print the money or borrow the money to pretend to pay for it.
And in the 19th century, children could be taught, this will blow your mind, but again, references are all below.
Children could be taught reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, history and geography for as little as $60 per year.
Oh, does that seem like a lot in the early 19th century?
It's not.
Those $60 a year to teach children are in 2013 dollars.
$60 a year.
One of the ways that it was done was you would learn something as a child and you would grow to the next level and then you would teach the children below who would pay you a penny or whatever to teach them something.
And so not only did you learn something, but the best way to know if you've learned something really well is to teach it.
And so you would learn something from the kids above you, pay them, and then you charge kids below you to teach them.
So there were teachers still, but there was a lot more cross-pollination of that.
And also mixing age is all supposed to, it's fairly well proven to increase empathy, which is the most scarce and valuable resource sometimes in human society.
So on average OECD governments annually spend $5,750 per pupil.
$5,750 per pupil.
So $60, $6,000 almost, That seems quite a bit of difference.
So the hundred-fold increase in the cost of education and a massive decline in the levels of literacy and competence is exactly what you would expect.
Listen, government schools are to education as communism is to the efficient allocation of goods.
It's the opposite.
Government is about indoctrination, boredom, fear.
And releasing you into the Lord of the Flies cattle pens with dysfunctional children so that you become afraid of your peers.
Because if you're afraid of your peers, you won't question those in authority.
Did you ever get called a keener, a nerd, a geek, a teacher's pet because you enjoyed or loved learning?
Were you ever attacked for your love of learning?
Were you ever scorned or mocked for your enthusiasm for learning?
That is the point.
To turn us on each other.
The slaves fight each other.
Barely need a truncheon.
As a percentage of per capita GDP, the U.S.
government expenditures per pupil in primary school have risen by 34% between 1998 and 2010.
Scores are all flat.
The government costs, of course, continue to go up and up and up.
The scores all remain flat or slightly declined.
A study done by the Cato Institute using data from the five largest metro areas in the U.S.
found that on average per pupil spending in these areas is 44% higher than officially reported.
Real spending per pupil per year ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area.
So it starts to get lunatic.
If the low real cost of education in Phoenix is 200 times what it used to cost to educate someone very well in the 19th century, I wouldn't call that progress.
Except for the incompetent parasites who prefer to be paid by coerced money rather than voluntary money.
Study concluded that public schools spend nearly 100% more than the estimated median private school.
And again, the private schools are not really that private.
You still have to follow, in a lot of cases, government curriculums.
You still have to hire government certified teachers.
So, it's a problem.
How much time are we spending in school?
It doesn't just feel endless.
It kind of is.
In 19 of the 33 OECD countries with available data in 2011, full enrollment in education begins between ages 3.
And four, in the other 14 countries, full enrollment starts between the ages of 5 and 6.
In almost two-thirds of OECD countries, at least 75% of 3- to 4-year-olds are enrolled in either pre-primary or primary programs.
And some of the most successful schools, government schools, I think in Finland, they start at the age of 7.
Well, of course, governments have a huge incentive to try and get children as early as possible for a variety of reasons.
You get to indoctrinate them more, you get to hire more teachers, which, because they're government teachers, gets you union dues and government support for the expansion of power.
Also, of course, it releases parents from actually caring for their children to get back into the workforce so they can stop paying taxes again.
So it is a win-win-win for everyone except the children, freedom, and the future.
Under 2011, the normal conditions of 5-year-olds in an OECD country can expect to participate in more than 17 years of full-time and part-time education, on average, before reaching the age of 40.
Annually, school hours for 5 to 12 and 13 to 18-year-olds adds up to 843 and 1078, respectively.
18-year-olds adds up to 843 and 1078, respectively.
These figures include homework.
And the story of homework is another issue completely.
It's never been proven to have any value whatsoever.
In fact, some of the most successful schools have the least or no homework.
But what it does do is it allows the government to reach into the home life.
And of course, it provokes conflict between parents and children, which is a foundational expansion of the destruction of family.
The undermining of family unity is foundational to the growth of the state.
In percentage of waking hours, high school children spend as much time on school-related work as adults with full-time jobs.
They spend as much time on school-related work as adults with full-time jobs spend on work.
So, going to school in your mid-teens to late teens is a full-time job.
Well, of course, we should also note that only 47% of Americans, adults, actually have a full-time job.
What if you want to homeschool?
Well, you have that option in some countries.
But in 2013, Germany, and we can see from its long history of government control of children, things like National Socialism and Nazism managed to rise out of nowhere.
Germany sent a chilling example for parents who want to homeschool their children.
A SWAT team raided the home of a German family and forcibly took all four children aged 7 to 14 away from their parents.
A family court judge authorized the raid, citing a failure to cooperate, quote, with the authorities to send the children to school.
The judge also authorized the use of force against the children.
No cooperation could be expected, he said, given that the children had adopted the parents' opinions on homeschooling.
So children thus belong to the state.
And of course, if more and more people homeschool, that's out of control of the government.
It's like the internet.
You just want to keep sending these tentacles of power to wrap around the fragile necks of flowering freedoms.
Of course, if lots of people start homeschooling, Well, there will be then a movement to reduce teachers and it's just governments like to get their hands on the malleable brains of children.
Homeschooling is illegal or severely restricted in Brazil, China, Greece, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey and many other countries.
And even if it's allowed, in most places it is generally carried out under strict government supervision.
Are authorities perhaps, as they would probably say, concerned with the low quality of home education?
Pfft.
Hardly.
Brian Ray, president of the U.S.
National Home Education Research Institute wrote, in study after study, children who learn at home consistently score 15 to 30 percentile points above the national averages.
I really want you to just take a moment and really understand what that means.
Most of the course homeschooling parents, they're not teachers.
They're not trained.
They're not professionals.
They're just moms and dads.
Getting together with other moms and dads.
So what this means... God, you'll never understand this.
What this means is that untrained amateurs are doing 50-30% better than trained professionals.
I mean, that's really astounding.
It's like if you did your own appendectomy with whiskey and a rusty spoon, that you'd have a 15-30% better chance of surviving and flourishing than if you went to a doctor.
This is so staggering that once you get it, once you really understand it, all of the rusty, girding superstructure of support for the state system would naturally fall away.
Amateurs do much, much better than professionals.
And of course, for a lot of us, how did school make you feel?
How did school make you feel?
I always felt, you know, in the end of the summer, it's like, okay, I'm ready, I'm bored.
Then you get back to school, like, oh, I'm not ready.
I wasn't that bored.
A study conducted by the Urban Institute found that over the course of a year, 41% of middle-aged, sorry, middle and high school students became victims of physical bullying and 45% experienced psychological bullying.
According to the US Department of Education, in 2011 about 28% of students aged 12 to 18 reported being bullied at school during the school year.
Girls were more likely to experience verbal aggression while boys were often the targets of physical aggression, physical abuse.
In addition to the overwhelming prevalence of bullying in schools, studies have shown that even when bullying victims or their parents bring these experiences to the school officials, the behavior is rarely addressed.
A 2003 study found what everybody knows.
Children were by far the least happy when they were at school or engaged in school-related activities and the happiest when they were out of school and engaging with friends.
As we all remember this rise and fall, children's happiness rose on weekends but significantly decreased on Sunday nights as they anticipated the upcoming school week.
Don't have a lot of trouble with bullying in the Boy Scouts.
Don't have a lot of trouble with bullying In churches.
And that's important.
That's important.
It's not impossible.
Now, as you've probably heard, there has been a scandal going on for many years in religions, particularly in the Catholic Church, with regards to child sexual abuse, which is of course horrifying and horrible.
What about government schools?
What is the level of sexual abuse in government schools?
If we're appalled by priests, as we rightly should be, how do we feel about teachers?
The BBC found out, British Broadcasting Corporation found out, that between 2008 and 2013, nearly 1,000 British UK teachers were accused of having a sexual relationship with a student.
An investigation by the Associated Press found out that 2,570 US teachers in the period of 2001 through 2005 had their licenses taken away due to allegations of sexual misconduct.
A major study commissioned by the U.S.
Department of Education found out that nearly 10% of U.S.
students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by public school employees.
10% of U.S.
students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by public school employees.
The weasel words in that, what is wanted sexual attention by government employees towards your children?
Extrapolating data from a national survey, this study found that about 290,000 students in the 1991-2000 period have experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee.
More than a quarter of a million.
290,000.
About 422,000 of California students enrolled in public schools would be victims of sexual abuse before graduation.
The author wrote, I think the Catholic Church has a problem.
The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.
But it's okay, because there are semi-socialist priests of the state, these teachers, and therefore we don't see it.
We don't see it.
So, obviously this presentation, this conversation could go on for a considerable period of time.
Hopefully you don't feel that it has.
But it is important to know the history.
These institutions don't arise out of nowhere.
They follow particular patterns of power, control, intimidation, and imprinting.
And when people put forward alternatives to the way that society is currently structured, people imagine that beyond the existing structure is a great, deep, dark, empty, bottomless void with no laws of physics, no time, no possibility, no future, or some Mad Max Razor-slicing, boomerang-tortured hellscape of human conflict over scarce resources.
None of this.
This is all lies.
Told you in the woods there'd be monsters.
Demons.
This is not true.
My most popular video is called The Story of Your Enslavement and You can check it out.
It probably will show up somewhere on YouTube to the right.
But people say, well, what's your solution?
You don't provide a solution.
It's like, no, no, there are lots of solutions.
Tons of solutions.
And history is replete with them.
We don't have to, you know.
Cover our eyes and throw darts, hoping to hit something.
History is replete with very great solutions.
History is very evident, provides endless evidence of what can happen outside existing power structures.
That what rushes in to fill the end of tyranny is very often a piece in voluntarism and far improved quality.
This is the challenge.
You know, everyone says, well, we care for our kids.
We'll do anything for our kids.
Well, okay.
Let's take that at face value.
There are things that we can do for my kids.
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