Monday, May 04, 2020


The Myth that Americans Were Poorly Educated before Mass Government Schooling

Early America had widespread literacy and a vibrant culture of learning

Parents the world over are dealing with massive adjustments in their children’s education that they could not have anticipated just three months ago. To one degree or another, pandemic-induced school closures are creating the “mass homeschooling” that FEE’s senior education fellow Kerry McDonald predicted two months ago.

Who knows, with millions of youngsters absent from government school classrooms, maybe education will become as good as it was before the government ever got involved.

“What?” you exclaim! “Wasn’t education lousy or non-existent before government mandated it, provided it, and subsidized it? That’s what my government schoolteachers assured me so it must be true,” you say!

The fact is, at least in early America, education was better and more widespread than most people today realize or were ever told. Sometimes it wasn’t “book learning” but it was functional and built for the world most young people confronted at the time. Even without laptops and swimming pools, and on a fraction of what government schools spend today, Americans were a surprisingly learned people in our first hundred years.

I was reminded a few days ago of the amazing achievements of early American education while reading the enthralling book by bestselling author Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln’s Battle With God: A President’s Struggle With Faith and What It Meant for America. It traces the spiritual journey of America’s 16th president—from fiery atheist to one whose last words to his wife on that tragic evening at Ford’s Theater were a promise to “visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.”

In a moment, I’ll cite a revealing, extended passage from Mansfield’s book but first, I’d like to offer some excellent, related works that come mostly from FEE’s own archives.

In 1983, Robert A. Peterson’s "Education in Colonial America" revealed some stunning facts and figures. “The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today even in our universities,” explains Peterson, “were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.” Incredibly, “A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly” [emphasis mine].

Well into the 19th Century, writes Susan Alder in "Education in America," "parents did not even consider that the civil government in any way had the responsibility or should assume the responsibility of providing for the education of children." Only one state (Massachusetts) even had compulsory schooling laws before the Civil War, yet literacy rates were among the highest in our history.

Great Britain experienced similar trends. In 1996, Edwin West wrote in "The Spread of Education Before Compulsion in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century" that “when national compulsion was enacted ([in 1880], over 95 percent of fifteen-year-olds were literate.” More than a century later, “40 percent of 21-year-olds in the United Kingdom admit[ted] to difficulties with writing and spelling.”

Laws against the education of black slaves date back to as early as 1740, but the desire to read proved too strong to prevent its steady growth even under bondage. For purposes of religious instruction, it was not uncommon for slaves to be taught reading but not writing. Many taught themselves to write, or learned to do so with the help of others willing to flout the law. Government efforts to outlaw the education of blacks in the Old South may not have been much more effective than today’s drug laws. If you wanted it, you could find it.

Estimates of the literacy rate among slaves on the eve of the Civil War range from 10 to 20 percent. By 1880, nearly 40 percent of southern blacks were literate. In 1910, half a century before the federal government involved itself in K-12 funding, black literacy exceeded 70 percent and was comparable to that of whites.

Daniel Lattier explained in a 2016 article titled "Did Public Schools Really Improve American Literacy?" that a government school system is no guarantee that young people will actually learn to read and write well. He cites the shocking findings of a study conducted by the US Department of Education: “32 million of American adults are illiterate, 21 percent read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate, which means they can’t read well enough to manage daily living and perform tasks required by many jobs.”

Compulsory government schools were not established in America because of some widely-perceived failure of private education, which makes it both erroneous and self-serving for the government school establishment to propagate the myth that Americans would be illiterate without them.

As Kerry McDonald wrote in "Public Schools Were Designed to Indoctrinate Immigrants," the prime motivation for government schooling was something much less benign than a fear of illiteracy. Her remarkable 2019 book, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom, explains the viable, self-directed alternatives that far outclass the standardized, test-driven, massively expensive and politicized government schooling of today.

If you’re looking for a good history of how America traveled the path of literacy to a national education crisis, you can find it in a recent, well-documented book by Justin Spears and associates, titled Failure: The History and Results of America’s School System. The way in which government short-changes parents, teachers, and students is heart-breaking.

I promised to share a passage from Stephen Mansfield’s book, so now I am pleased to deliver it. Read it carefully, and let it soak in:


"We should remember that the early English settlers in the New World left England accompanied by fears that they would pursue their “errand into the wilderness” and become barbarians in the process. Loved ones at home wondered how a people could cross an ocean and live in the wild without losing the literacy, the learning, and the faith that defined them. The early colonists came determined to defy these fears. They brought books, printing presses, and teachers with them and made the founding of schools a priority. Puritans founded Boston in 1630 and established Harvard College within six years. After ten years they had already printed the first book in the colonies, the Bay Psalm Book. Many more would follow. The American colonists were so devoted to education—inspired as they were by their Protestant insistence upon biblical literacy and by their hope of converting and educating the natives—that they created a near-miraculous culture of learning.

This was achieved through an educational free market. Colonial society offered “Dame schools,” Latin grammar schools, tutors for hire, what would today be called “home schools,” church schools, schools for the poor, and colleges for the gifted and well-to-do. Enveloping these institutions of learning was a wider culture that prized knowledge as an aid to godliness. Books were cherished and well-read. A respected minister might have thousands of them. Sermons were long and learned. Newspapers were devoured, and elevated discussion of ideas filled taverns and parlors. Citizens formed gatherings for the “improvement of the mind”—debate societies and reading clubs and even sewing circles at which the latest books from England were read.

The intellectual achievements of colonial America were astonishing. Lawrence Cremin, dean of American education historians, estimated the literacy rate of the period at between 80 and 90 percent. Benjamin Franklin taught himself five languages and was not thought exceptional. Jefferson taught himself half a dozen, including Arabic. George Washington was unceasingly embarrassed by his lack of formal education, and yet readers of his journals today marvel at his intellect and wonder why he ever felt insecure. It was nothing for a man—or in some cases a woman—to learn algebra, geometry, navigation, science, logic, grammar, and history entirely through self-education. A seminarian was usually required to know Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French and German just to begin his studies, instruction which might take place in a log classroom and on a dirt floor.

This culture of learning spilled over onto the American frontier. Though pioneers routinely moved beyond the reach of even basic education, as soon as the first buildings of a town were erected, so too, were voluntary societies to foster intellectual life. Aside from schools for the young, there were debate societies, discussion groups, lyceums, lecture associations, political clubs, and always, Bible societies.

The level of learning these groups encouraged was astounding. The language of Shakespeare and classical literature—at the least Virgil, Plutarch, Cicero, and Homer—so permeated the letters and journals of frontier Americans that modern readers have difficulty understanding that generation’s literary metaphors. This meant that even a rustic Western settlement could serve as a kind of informal frontier university for the aspiring. It is precisely this legacy and passion for learning that shaped young Abraham Lincoln during his six years in New Salem"


Not bad for a society that hardly even knew what a government school was for generations, wouldn’t you say? Why should we blindly assume today that we couldn’t possibly get along without government schools? Instead, we should be studying how remarkable it was that we did so well without them.

When I think of the many ways that government deceives us into its embrace, one in particular really stands out: It seeks to convince us how helpless we would be without it. It tells us we can’t do this, we can’t do that, that government possesses magical powers beyond those of mere mortals and that yes, we’d be dumb as dirt and as destitute as drifters if we didn’t put it in charge of one thing or another.

When it comes to education, Americans really should know better. Maybe one positive outcome of the virus pandemic is that they will rediscover that they don’t need government schools as much as the government told them they do. In fact, we never did.

SOURCE 





No One Has a Right to an Education

In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times is celebrating a decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that a good education is a constitutional right and, therefore, that states have a legal duty to provide it to children. The court’s decision and the Times’ celebration of it only goes to show how America’s welfare-state way of life has warped and perverted sound thinking with respect to the nature of rights and the purposes of the Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution called into existence a limited-government republic, a type of governmental system by which the federal government’s powers would be limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. If a power wasn’t enumerated, then it could not be exercised.

There is no grant of power in the U.S. Constitution to provide education to anyone.

Despite its name, the Bill of Rights also does not grant anyone the right to an education or, for that matter, any other right. The first ten amendments should really have been called the Bill of Prohibitions. Rather than giving people rights, they prohibit the federal government from infringing on rights. Our ancestors understood that such rights as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness don’t come from government. They come from nature and God and, therefore, preexist government.

Freedom entails the right to live your life the way you choose, so long as you are not violating other people’s rights through violence or fraud. Thus, as long as you’re not engaging in murder, theft, rape, and other such crimes, freedom entitles you to make whatever choices you want, even if everyone else disapproves of them.

Thus, no one has the right to initiate violence or fraud against another person because to do so violates his right to live his life the way he chooses. If someone does violate the rights of another person, that’s when government steps in and arrests, prosecutes, convicts, and punishes the malefactor. That’s in fact one of the legitimate functions of government.

Thou shalt not steal

Let’s assume that I accost you in a dark alley and rob you of $5,000. I am very poor and my child is not getting a good education in public schools. I use the $5,000 to pay the tuition for a private school that has accepted my child.

Do I have a right to do that? If you subscribe to the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit, I do. Remember: the Court is saying that my child has a right to an education. If he’s not getting it in public school, then what’s wrong with my stealing your money and using to get my child his education? I’m just exercising my child’s “right” to a good education.

Now, granted, neither the Court nor the Times would countenance private stealing, even stealing that fulfills a perceived “right” to an education. But their reasoning does countenance political stealing that in principle is no different.

If a child has a “right’ to an education, then someone has to be forced to provide it. That would be the state. But no state government has money of its own. They all get their money through taxation, which is based on force. Thus, under the Sixth Circuit’s reasoning, the state is required to forcibly take money from its citizens — i.e., politically steal from them — to fulfill the “right” of children to an education.

And what if no one wishes to teach? Under the Sixth Circuit’s reasoning, a citizen doesn’t have the option of saying no. If no one wants to fulfill a child’s “right” to an education, then teachers would have to be conscripted — that is, forced — to teach. Refusal to do so would amount to violating someone’s “right” to an education.

The welfare state

And why stop there? If people have a “right” to an education, then why not also a right to housing, clothing, food, a car, a television set, a computer, and other things? Why not just have a giant taxing scheme that sucks trillions of dollars out of the income of the citizens and provides a gigantic pool of money to dole out to people to fulfill their “right” to be provided for by the state?

Oh, I forgot! That’s the system we already live under. That’s what the welfare state is all about!

Interestingly, the Sixth Circuit and the Times limit their reasoning to children. But there are lots of adults in the United States who are illiterate, at least in English. Why don’t they have a right to an education too? Where in the Constitution does it say that only children have a right to an education? Shouldn’t the states be required to set up tax-funded education institutions and bureaucracies to fulfill the right of adults to an education?

Rather than decree that people have a “right” to an education, what the Sixth Circuit should have done is declare the state’s compulsory school-attendance law unconstitutional as a violation of liberty, which is a natural, God-given right protected by the Constitution. After all, the Fourteenth Amendment is clear: No state shall deny any person liberty without due process of law.

SOURCE 





School folly in Australia

If the Ruby Princess has been Australia’s single most avoidable slip-up on spreading coronavirus infections, the most unnecessary stuff-up in the societal and economic response has been the way students have been shunned from schools. Most students are yet to return to classrooms they never should have left.

We have known since the virus first arrived on our shores — and research and experience have only reinforced it since — that, unlike common colds and influenza, COVID-19 rarely infects children, their symptoms tend to be mild and they don’t seem to spread it. This serendipitous reality means schooling need not be disrupted beyond handwashing and distancing measures, special arrangements for vulnerable or older teachers, and efforts to limit interactions between parents, teachers and other adults.

There are plenty of test cases with infections detected among students and teachers in a handful of schools in various states where they have been controlled. In South Australia schools were never shut and there was only one case — a student infected by a teacher — and it was resolved with no further infections.

The clear and consistent advice from the chief medical officer has been to proceed with schooling but, under pressure from teachers’ unions, state governments have given students the Dusty Martin “don’t argue”. Fittingly, Victoria has been most delinquent, with NSW and Queensland not far behind. Students have suffered most, but the restrictions have seriously encumbered parents and added to our societal sclerosis. The states should admit their mistakes and resume schooling on Monday.

As we all struggled to come to grips with the vagaries of this pandemic, schools were wise to invest in online schooling plans in case we lost control. They deserved time at the end of the first term to make those preparations — but, having done that, you get the sense they feel obliged to put those plans into action.

Certainly, it would be unfair for teachers to run two streams, one for classrooms and the other online. It needs to be one or the other and, on the facts as we know them, it should be the classroom. Some political and media commentary has been deliberately or unforgivably ignorant; complaining about contradictions such as why it might be safe to go to school yet unsafe to go to a cinema.

Such smartarsery ignores the importance of schooling, the lower susceptibility of young people, the controlled environment of schools and the whole intent of the measures: they are not primarily about protecting people from life-threatening situations but are aimed at slowing the spread of a virus that mainly threatens the elderly.

Fatality rates for people aged under 50 are a fraction of 1 per cent, and deaths under 20 years of age are unheard of, except for rare instances with serious pre-existing conditions. So, arrangements for schools, workplaces, shopping, entertainment and sport have been about slowing the spread of a highly infectious disease, not hiding from a deadly threat.

Studies show anything up to 50 per cent of those infected may never know it, while more than 80 per cent of those who develop symptoms won’t even need to consider hospitalisation.

When he declared that playing golf was “not worth someone’s life” Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews became the epitome of this wrongheaded fearmongering.

Families should not be huddled at home as if to avoid a killer virus; they are doing no more than their civic duty to slow the spread of a virus that mainly threatens others. It is the elderly and the sick who have most to fear.

The more we control the situation, the better we protect the vulnerable and ensure our health system copes. Teaching schoolchildren should not be more dangerous than running a supermarket checkout or selling sandwiches.

If we tried to generate a list of people with the requisite experience in managing the medical, public health, economic, business, social, and law enforcement aspects of a coronavirus pandemic, we would come up with no one. We are making this up as we go along. Those who are certain that other nations have succeeded where we have been left wanting are having a lend. We just cannot be sure yet.

There is plenty of expertise to be drawn on; medicos, scientists, economists, bureaucrats, police and politicians used to multifaceted policy problems. But the global scale, rapidity of spread, closure of businesses, deliberate suppression of economic activity, and calculated imposition of social isolation are all unprecedented on their own merits, let alone as a clutch of simultaneous dilemmas.

Much of the media targets Don­ald Trump over the disaster that has unfolded in New York City and elsewhere. But, so far, the death rate per million people is worse than the US in Italy, Bel­gium, The Netherlands, Spain, France, Britain, Sweden and Ireland. We have yet to see this play out in the developing world. This pandemic is likely still in its early stages.

If we are forced to live the next year or longer without a vaccine, who is to say what strategy will be revealed as superior?

Countries with higher death rates will have developed broader exposure and community immunity that could stand them in good stead, so that countries such as ours might be left wondering how long we can afford to drag out the process.

Alternatively, if treatments and vaccines become available within months, other nations will have suffered health system crises, unnecessary deaths and economic pain in an excruciating trifecta that countries such as ours have avoided.

But, crucially, we have the choice — we have bought time and options to work out next steps. This is the true measure of Scott Morrison’s success.

After resisting the overeager shutdown merchants early on, the government now faces pressure from the other end. The supposed hardheads are urging the government to let it rip, suggesting the way we have avoided a crisis renders our preventive measures excessive, even though they see in Milan, New York and London what could befall us.

Risk mitigation is a devilishly difficult practice for public assessment. Think of Shane Fitzsimmons, who headed NSW’s Rural Fire Service for a decade. It was his job for more than a decade to minimise the bushfire risk and maximise the ability to protect lives and property.

Yet in the wake of the worst bushfire season his state has seen, where limited fuel reduction, bad planning and miscued control burns all played a role in the devastating and deadly outcome, he has been lauded as a hero.

In the pandemic fight, Morrison and the premiers faced media predictions just two months ago of hospitals being overwhelmed within days and a death toll of 150,000 or more.

With fatalities yet to reach 100, and daily national new infections sometimes not reaching double figures, the criticism is now about overreacting. Go figure.

Citing bolstered bed capacity not yet required as proof of over-reaction, you might as well argue that because most fire trucks extinguish only one blaze a fortnight, the fire department must be over-resourced. Perhaps if NSW had cleared wider fire breaks around national parks, forced property owners to clear around houses in bushfire-prone areas or thrown more resources into extinguishing blazes that burned for weeks in national parks, the state would have faced less trauma and tragedy, and Fitzsimmons would have been attacked for overdoing precautions.

Six weeks ago we were disturbed about where this would lead and I wrote: “This pandemic is a terrible dilemm­a for policymakers: at one end of the spectrum, they could be destroying small and large businesses (the life’s work of their owners) and tossing people into unemployment in an effort to stem a disease that might be best dealt with by protecting the elderly and the frail; at the other, they could allow a pandemic to smother our society, overwhelm our hospitals and lead to tens of thousands of premature deaths.”

We can see already that Morrison and his state and territory colleagues in the national cabinet have saved us from the latter scenario. Job well done.

Their challenge now is to remove restrictions as quickly as possible, to reactivate society and the economy behind secure national borders, without allowing the virus to run riot and destroy all that we have preserved. Every day of isolation exacerbates the economic and social pain.

The strong bias must be towards freeing up the economy, getting people back to work and protecting the vulnerable.

Getting back to school would be the best start.

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