“. . . To study for ourselves is the true method of acquiring methods of activity. The horse that goes round in a mill, and the boy [sic] that is anticipated and led by the hand in all his acquirements, is not active. I do not call a wheel that turns around fifty times a minute active.” So said William Godwin in The Enquirer in 1797.

Godwin was ahead of his times in many respects: he wed Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist of the era (with whom he had a child—Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame); he wrote one of the first (if not the first) “mystery novels,” Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams; and he is widely accredited with producing one of the seminal works of libertarian philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness.

At the time he was writing, the idea of a “public” or national school system was still a fresh concept. Nonetheless, Godwin presaged present problems with public education in a clear manner that still rings true. He foreshadowed the atrophy of the mind that occurs when students “learn after the manner of parrots,” and critiqued the compulsory nature of school attendance. More dramatically, he referred to schools as “three-quarters of the slavery and restraint that are now imposed upon young persons.”

Though this may seem like inflammatory hyperbole, the underlying message has the ring of validity if we allow ourselves the mental freedom to consider large-scale alternatives to our present means of social organization. 

The increasing centralization of educational priorities, in the form of federally-mandated standards (like No Child Left Behind), should give us pause, for one can hardly imagine (at first thought) why the president or our esteemed legislators would even care what the benchmarks for math are—let alone whether they are qualified to determine a broad, sweeping revision of teachers’ lesson plans for years to come.

In the light of the ballooning number of standardized tests and benchmarks it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that education has become not so much an exercise in learning, as it is an exercise in obedience. As opposed to a Deweyite model, which would emphasize the role of the student in choosing their own curriculum, our educational priorities are assigned to us the whole time we are in elementary education, with minimal self-guidance allowed to the learner.

The moment we are thrown into the mix, we are automatically relegated to the bottom rung of a hierarchy, which (ostensibly) it would be nearly impossible to topple. 

Students have no agency, no right to free speech and their exposure to their natural community—other students—is haphazard and divisional; unless it is a very small school district, students of one grade do not (as a general rule) attend class with students in other grades, and so it is already implicitly suggested that people from different “strata” are not to associate.

Unfortunately, our “educational” system does not exist for the sake of the pupils, or the parents, or the community. It is a mechanism of inculcation, at best, providing useless propaganda for the purpose of socializing the students to a top-down method of political control; it is a vocationally-oriented exercise in social control, which at times would seem to prefer well-trained monkeys to critically-thinking human beings. The perhaps intended result is disenfranchisement, as the individual is subsumed into the larger order without ever being offered a choice.

Schools should be an institution based on a local level, exhibiting values and beliefs inherent to their community. They should not be compulsory, but entirely voluntary, for our participation is only personally beneficial insofar as we are interested in learning. Making non-attendance illegal is tantamount to criminalizing the beautifully spontaneous freedom of childhood. For many of us, it is the first step into subservience outside the family structure, and our first glimpse at an ugly atomized culture that would just as soon crush you as commune with you.

I think it is obvious our interest in learning is diminished by the educational system. True, we may have inspiring teachers, or participate in enriching extracurricular activities. But these do not require a totalizing state institution to exist. Most of the deeper learning we experience at school happens in spite of, rather than because of, the machinations of our teachers, the principal, the school board or the Secretary of Education. 

If we are to gain control of our own future and encourage self-education for the enrichment of all, then we should seek to divest the public school system of its broad standards and hierarchies and give the power back to the students. 

For, if public schools do not exist for the sake of the students, whose interests do they in fact serve?

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