Separate school and state? But how will children get an education unless the government gives it to them?

Alan Schaeffer, the current president of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, explained at the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum, some of the underpinnings of the current government education system, why it doesn’t educate children, and how educational freedom can give our children the education they so desperately need.

Here’s a quote, from H. L. Mencken, in his own magazine,The American Mercury, in April 1924. This quote was abbreviated slightly in Schaeffer’s speech, but I think a fuller quotation is instructive:

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. — American Mercury Magazine

Schaeffer covers how this is just as true now as then, which is one reason why education, if it is truly desirable, must not be a function of government.

This short talk was part of the opening ceremonies at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum and introduced the education track which culminated with a speech by John Taylor Gatto, a former Teacher of the Year who has written several books on how and why American public education fails to educate our children, including the recently released Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.