Time for Individualism in Education?

The last several years have seen a growing interest in the American principles of liberty, personal responsibility, and individualism. These three principles are often applied to the areas of government spending and growth, but their application is also desperately needed in the American education system.

The connection between these principles and education was once noted by Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen in a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism. Although his work is nearly ninety years old, Machen’s comments on educational choice are surprisingly applicable and deserve a thoughtful examination in the midst of National School Choice Week.

Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice. And that realm, in the modern state, is being slowly but steadily contracted. The tendency is making itself felt especially in the sphere of education. The object of education, it is now assumed, is the production of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But the greatest happiness for the greatest number, it is assumed further, can be defined only by the will of the majority. Idiosyncrasies in education, therefore, it is said, must be avoided, and the choice of schools must be taken away from the individual parent and placed in the hands of the state. The state then exercises its authority through the instruments that are ready to hand, and at once, therefore, the child is placed under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life, who proceed to prevent any such acquaintance being gained by those who come under their care. …

In the state of Oregon, on Election Day, 1922, a law was passed by a referendum vote in accordance with which all children in the state are required to attend the public schools. Christian schools and private schools, at least in the all-important lower grades, are thus wiped out of existence. Such laws, which if the present temper of the people prevails will probably soon be extended far beyond the bounds of one state, … mean of course the ultimate destruction of all real education. When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are – their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudo-scientific fads of experimental psychology – one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system. But the principle of such laws and their ultimate tendency are far worse than the immediate results. … A public-school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools. A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them then to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword permitted thought at least to be free.

Unfortunately for our children, today’s public school system has become “monopolistic” and is growing even more so by encouraging a standardized, cookie-cutter curriculum through efforts such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Indeed, the public schools are continuing to crush “the higher aspirations of humanity” by discouraging children from aiming high academically and delighting in subjects beyond the basics of math and reading. Furthermore, the government’s education system continues to fill our nation’s young minds “with the materialism of the day” by promoting a variety of feel-good policies such as social justice, diversity, and multiculturalism, ideas which subtly squelch free thought and advance philosophies contrary to the core principles of America’s Founding.

Despite these discouraging facts, there can be an “escape from … [the] soul-killing system” of the public schools. As Machen implied in the preceding paragraphs, the beauty of educational choice is that it abolishes the tyranny of the state, gives parents the freedom to exercise their personal responsibility in regards to their own child, and also promises to restore academic health for the children left in the public schools. Expanding school choice certainly would not cure every ill of the public education system, but if it advances the liberty, personal responsibility, and individualism that have helped make our country great, then it should be encouraged wholeheartedly.