Schools

"What is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life -- to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this -- a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one." -Herbert Spencer


Schooling is the process by which centers of authority, with their own interests in mind, mold individuals into certain forms.

The origins of universal mandatory state schooling are in the 16th century Protestant movement for government-run education. Luther, the leading figure in this movement, argued that the government ought to assume control over schools and enforce universal attendance in order to fight "a war with devil". By this, he meant the state schools could be used to purge society of demonic religious beliefs, particularly Judaism and Catholicism. In early America, Calvinist Puritans seeking to establish a Calvinist theocracy in the New World established public schools with the intention of suppressing religious dissent. Early on, Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted their supremacy over the schooling system by forbidding Quakers to establish their own schools. Later, Connecticut forbad the "New Light" evangelicals to establish evangelical schools. It is notable that the most free and tolerant colony in colonial America was Rhode Island, which had no public schooling.

Aside from enforcing religious conformity, state schools were also established for the purpose of creating cultural and linguistic conformity. In Asia and much of Central and and Eastern Europe, as well as in colonial Quebec, public schooling was instituted with the purpose of crushing the national and cultural identities of linguistic minorities or of colonized peoples, by forcing students to conform to the dominant culture of their nation or to the culture of an occupying nation.

Similarly, the early advocates of public schooling in America saw their mission as that of eliminating the cultural particularities of the numerous waves of new immigrants to the United States. Through public schooling, these reformers thought, the government could mold the various cultural and ethnic groups in the United States into "one people".

Other educational reformers, like Horace Mann, saw the mission of public schooling as that of suppressing the irrational impulses of the "mobocracy", by which he meant the popular Democratic movement of poor farmers in the 19th century, who challenged state power and American political and economic elites, and advocated economic and political decentralization. A central function of the state school, as it is run by the state, must necessarily be to keep the masses in line.

In general, proponents of universal state schooling have argued that, by creating a consensus of political and social views among the masses, state schooling will create stability and ensure the subservience of citizens to the nation-state. I will trust the word of the crusaders for public schooling, and assume that state schools are nothing more than instruments used by the government to ensure conformity and inculcate in citizens the virtue of obedience.

Unfortunately, as the British philosopher William Godwin recognized, subordinating people's intellects and consciences to the agenda of established authority has disastrous consequences for the moral and intellectual development of subjects of this authority. As the movement for state schooling accelerated in the 1800's, Godwin lamented, "Destroy us if you please; but do not endeavor, by a national education, to destroy in our understandings the discernment of justice and injustice". Meanwhile, Johann Fichte of Prussia argued that nation-states ought to spend large sums on education because, "The state which introduced universally the national education proposed by us, from the moment that a new generation of youths passed through it, would need no special army at all, but would have in them an army such as no age has yet seen".


For children, all creative progress, moral, intellectual, or otherwise, is made in spite of the attempts by educational authorities to direct students' diverse creative impulses into rigid mechanical processes. That this anti-creativity is characteristic of all centers of authority is the fundamental tenet of anarchism, and I hold this tenet to be true both because of empirical evidence and because of necessary truths about the nature of authority.

As Nietzsche pointed out, throughout history, the periods of greatest periods of creative development have been periods of political decline. I find this to be particularly true in the case of intellectual development. For example, during the English Civil war, when the power of the monarchy and the feudal lords were weakened, uneducated homeless people and soldiers developed brilliant political and theological ideas through open discussion. In doing so, they produced some of the most profound analyses of democratic theory in history, and also many anti-authoritarian theological doctrines, which involved examination of such things as the political purpose of the ideas of hell and salvation. During the political chaos of the French Revolution, pioneer analyses of the predicaments of women, gays, slaves, and Jews were developed simultaneously, and laid the groundwork for much future Western thought.

The reason that the state and other centers of authority restrict human creativity is that by their very function, permanent structures of authority are not designed to cope with the vicissitudes of the creative passions of their subjects. As Machiavelli wisely pointed out, governments are by their very nature reactionary, because their primary goal is always the maintenance and expansion of power, a goal which tends to be at odds with the progressive interests of the subjects of government, who are controlled and repressed by power-seeking institutions.

The school, which is in a sense an educational government, exhibits the goals of government as interpreted by Machiavelli. Teachers who teach counter-culture views can not free students from intellectual repression, because the source of such repression is not the attitude of the teacher, but the school itself.

It is not primarily the content of a curriculum that gives it its purpose as a tool for controlling students, but the method and the context in which the information and ideological analyses are delivered. In the school environment, the student must consciously or unconsciously mold his psychological habits to suit the demands of the permanent classroom setting and of the authority of the teacher, who operates within an academic institution not prone to continuous alterations in its fundamental structure through direct democratic means.

Because the school, as traditionally understood, suppresses intellectual creativity, the school is an obstruction to the educational process rather than an essential component of education. The student is an object of the education process, and a tool of the school, which is not only a form of government in and of itself, but also, when state-run, an organ of the national government.


In The False Principle of Our Education, the individualist anarchist Max Stirner distinguished between the "free man" and the "educated man." The latter is the type produced through schooling and the type suitable for academic life. The former can only be produced through individual intellectual effort. The free man, Stirner explained, is one who knows how to inspect and deconstruct the "wheels in his head," or the ideas and intellectual habits fostered in him by the powerful. A liberatory approach to education seeks to figure out ways in which to allow individuals to become more free, and not ways of reforming educational institutions so that they educate more efficiently.