The School Revolution (5 page)

I am not suggesting that I will ever have this kind of effect on people with respect to the power of my ideas. My contribution intellectually is minimal. My legacy involves the combining of job and calling in a public way that has enabled me to communicate the ideas of Austrian economics to millions of
people who never heard of Austrian economics. F. A. Hayek once described an intellectual as a person who deals in secondhand ideas. I guess that would qualify everyone in Congress as an intellectual, since they surely do not deal in original ideas. But, in my case, I am promoting the idea that it is possible to take a systematic body of ideas and apply them to real-world situations. If I can get this
idea across to a generation of high school students, I believe that a few of them will be able to make major contributions because they have the innate abilities of a Mises or a Rothbard.

Back in 1936, libertarian author Albert J. Nock wrote a chapter in a book. The chapter was titled “Isaiah’s Job.” In it, he presented the idea of “the remnant.”
He said that the remnant is out there waiting to commit to ideas they perceive as life changing and world changing. They seek out people who share these ideas. He argued that anyone who attempts to go directly to the remnant, putting pressure on them to commit, will drive them away. They will find other people to represent them, which means that these other people will express their ideas in
a unique way. The remnant is essentially invisible to any would-be leader. Nock recommended a program of libertarian leadership. That leadership involves self-improvement.

Never in the history of man has anything been equal to the Internet in enabling people to find others who represent their views and can articulate these views effectively. Search engines are used day and night to find
websites and articles that defend a particular outlook. In 1994, none of this existed. Today, it is rapidly changing the world. With the Internet, the remnant is seeking out people who articulate their deepest commitments. Search by search, people are finding other people who represent the ideas they hold dear. None of this was planned. It all seems random. Nock would have said that it is not
random, yet to me it truly seems random. We have the phrase “Birds of a feather flock together.” Facebook proves this every day. It proves this to something like a billion people.

Technologies change every day. There is no way that a single technology or digital innovation is likely to become dominant, although YouTube certainly qualifies as a candidate. To choose a particular technology
as the technology of the future is probably a mistake. On the other hand, to choose certain principles of action, which are ultimately grounded in ethics, involves making decisions about things that are permanent. Principles are unchanging; their application in history is always changing. Principles such as the Golden Rule are permanent. Treat others as you would be treated. Their violation comes
in all manner of creative ways. Some people are amazingly skilled at violating principles in new and creative ways. Other people are equally skilled at obeying them in new and creative ways.

The principles of libertarianism, like the principles of religion, teach that, in the long run, good overcomes evil. The productivity of peace-loving, law-abiding individuals is greater than the
productivity of violent lawbreakers. If society promotes peace, it promotes creativity in every realm of life. It promotes economic growth. It promotes the eradication of poverty.

A program of reform must have principles that are consistent and that can be applied in the real world. I am not promoting mysticism. I am not promoting a retreat into some kind of monastic order. I am promoting
a program of systematic, lifetime education, meaning a program of permanent self-improvement. This is what Leonard E. Read promotes in chapter 2 of
Elements of Libertarian Leadership
.

If someone at the age of fifteen or sixteen gets a vision of what his legacy can be, and he is also taught the skills required to begin to develop this
legacy, all it takes is a motivational program to persuade him to commit. Maybe he commits to one agenda for a lifetime. Maybe he commits for only a few years. But he gets started. He gets the compound growth process operating in his life. He begins to learn how to express himself on-screen, which means both writing and speaking. He begins to advance himself along a path of dedication and leadership.
That phrase became the title of an important book written by a man who was a major Communist Party leader in Great Britain, Douglas Hyde, who abandoned the party in favor of Christianity in the late 1940s.
Dedication and Leadership
was published in 1966. It is a great little book. But even more important was the little-known book published half a decade earlier:
Dedication and Leadership Techniques
. This was the printed transcript of a seminar Hyde gave to a handful of priests and nuns in 1962. This book is part of my curriculum. It lays out the strategy adopted by the Communists from Lenin to Khrushchev. Hyde did not believe that freedom-loving people should adopt all the techniques, especially those involving blind obedience to the party. But he did believe that the Communists’ appeal
to youthful idealism was basic to communism’s success during the first half of the twentieth century.

Maybe you would like more information on developing your legacy. If so, send an email to:

Here are some things to remember from part 1:

The war over the structure
and content of K–12 education has been going on for 180 years. This war has escalated since the late 1950s. Little by little, parents are pulling their children out of the tax-funded schools.

The battle rests on a fundamental difference of opinion. The statist educators are committed to this principle: parents are not trained nor competent enough to make decisions about their children’s
educations. Millions of parents disagree. They have removed their children from the tax-funded schools. This is an act of faith. They have made a major break with the reigning assumption of the welfare state—namely, that the state should have a monopoly over K–12 education.

The reform of education must begin with a reform of ourselves. We must structure our lives in terms of that principle:
there can be no separation between liberty and responsibility
. This applies to individuals. It also applies to institutions. It applies to all schooling. Children must be taught by families and teachers to honor this principle.

When schools are not structured in terms of this principle, they produce what is sometimes called cognitive dissonance. It is the issue “do as I say,
not as I do.” In other words, the schools teach about freedom and choice and personal liberty but the school’s very existence is in opposition to those principles. This never sells well among children or students. People want those in charge to be consistent. They do not want to submit to people who violate their first principles. Without trust, there is no libertarian leadership. Authorities are
then forced to rely on sticks rather than carrots to gain compliance. They do not lead by example. They do not gain voluntary compliance. They get grudging obedience at best.

Here is my position on government:
self-government is vastly better.
It is far more moral. It is much more efficient.

I want to see a continual stream of leaders in every area of life who are
committed to this principle of government. That is why I put together the homeschool curriculum that trains young people to become leaders. But the leadership I favor is uniquely libertarian. It was described by Leonard E. Read back in 1962. It begins with this principle: all reform should begin with self-reform. The libertarian leader should seek to become a role model, an example to be imitated.
Persuasion is superior to coercion
. Libertarian leadership is based on that principle. It is essential that a leader walk the talk. He should speak softly and not carry a big stick.

A major goal of all life, which includes all leadership, is to leave behind a positive legacy that should be worth imitating. To do this, a person must distinguish between his job and his calling
in life. He should devote a portion of his time and money to his calling: the most important thing he can do and for which he would be most difficult to replace. Yet he will be replaced; death guarantees this. So he should do whatever he can to train successors. This is a fundamental aspect of leadership.

The goal should be compound growth in this legacy, before a person dies and afterward.
This is a long-term legacy: intergenerational. With the Internet, leaving this legacy to future generations has never been cheaper. The technology is here. What is in short supply today is the dedication and leadership necessary to building a legacy and building a following to extend it across borders and through time.

This is what my curriculum is designed to produce: dedication and
leadership. But before we get to the specifics, we need to understand the need for educational reform. We also need a strategy. I offer both in part 2.

 

T
here have been calls for reforming the public schools for as long as there have been public schools. Within the educational establishment, there have been innumerable proposals for restructuring public education, in terms of both its curriculum and its methodology. There have been many reforms over the years. Probably the most
important one was the substitution of the look-say method of reading instruction for the traditional phonics-based system. The archetype of the system we oldsters remember was Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane had a dog, Spot. For those of us who attended public school in the 1940s, this transition from phonics to look-say is marked in our memories by these phrases: “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” Spot
is not running anymore, except in our memories.

There has been no widely adopted system of public school reform suggested by parents. Every call for reform that has ever been taken up by the public school establishment has come from inside the public school establishment. Every proposed reform that has gained even a little traction in the public schools has been issued from
the top down. The centralization of public education has gone on for over a century. The consolidation of school districts, the expansion of the school bus system, and the expansion of state and federal funding in local school districts have all combined to remove parental influence in the day-to-day affairs of the schools. Parental authority may be given lip service by the bureaucracy, and the
PTA may officially be consulted (and ignored) on this or that minor local issue, but along with state and federal money has come state and federal control over the content and structure of public education. This is a manifestation of the ancient rule “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” There will never be any successful system of reform in any institution that is not accompanied by a change in
funding.
The means of reform is always a change in the source of funding
.

The centralization of public education has gone on for so long that, at this point, it would seem to be totally utopian to propose any significant reform. It is not that such reform is inconceivable. It is that such reform is highly unlikely. There would have to be a reestablishment of local funding,
local control, and foundational parental input into local education. This would have to be accompanied by the abolition of state and federal funding for education. In other words, the reform of tax-funded education must begin with a reform of the financing of local schools. Any proposed reform of the local public schools that is not accompanied by a call for the abolition of all state and federal
funding, as well as all state and federal rules governing local education, is simply utopian. There is no possibility of any such reform. Another ancient slogan is appropriate here: “If you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding.”

Therefore, any proposed reform of the public schools has to be accompanied by a call either to increase local taxation in order to compensate
for the decreased funding from the state and federal governments, or else to adopt drastic cost-cutting. In that scenario, a lot of people would have to be fired. Classes would have to be made much larger. The student-to-teacher ratio would return to what it was in the 1950s, meaning at least thirty students per teacher. This would be resisted by the teachers’ union. Of course nobody likes to see
people fired. But in exchange for a painful transition, you would essentially wind up with local schools controlled by their communities and the values therein, not by some distant bureaucrat who is pulling the purse strings and therefore calling all the shots.

Furthermore, there would have to be increased reliance on the Internet to deliver classroom lectures into households and distant
classrooms. This is already being done across the country—but quietly. This is how school districts are increasing the student-to-teacher ratio—quietly. A teacher who records her classes in digital format can teach fifty students, one hundred students, or even a thousand students, who view the class on a computer screen. Low-paid teaching assistants can grade exams. So can machines and computer
programs. This has been done at the college level for two decades. Why not in high schools?

A revolution in funding must be accompanied by a revolution in the content of the public school curriculum. The problem is this:
there is no agreement on the content
. Beginning around 1965—the advent of the counterculture movement—there has been a fragmentation of academic opinion on the appropriate
content in the social sciences and humanities. There is agreement only on what should not be taught—namely, anything to do with Christianity. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly decided that no tax funding should go toward the support of any sectarian religious creed.
9
These decisions specifically targeted Christianity. So, now we have a situation in which the bulk of the American population,
which is Christian, is taxed to fund the public schools, which by federal court interpretation are not allowed to teach the fundamental doctrines held dear by a majority of the Americans who are paying for the system.

We see a similar hostility to libertarianism. There is no such thing as a public school textbook that favors or even legitimately discusses the historical,
political, and economic interpretations of authors such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. Students at the high school level are taught—as their parents were taught, and their grandparents were taught—that President Franklin Roosevelt saved American capitalism from itself. They are taught to revere Roosevelt’s New Deal, both in its interventionist domestic economic policies
and its interventionist foreign policy. There is no such thing as a public school textbook critical of the New Deal. There may be a few negative words about Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1938, and how Congress resisted this emphatically. That is just about the only mistake Roosevelt supposedly made in his twelve-year career as president of the United States.

So, how
can voters reform education in the United States, assuming that a majority of voters want to do this? The tradition of public education, coupled with the centralization of funding by state governments and the federal government, seems to make any such proposed reform a political impossibility.

I have good news. It can be done. There is a working model for such a reform. That particular
reform is not yet completed, but it is certainly in its advanced stages. I am referring to the U.S. Postal Service.

For decades, conservatives and libertarians called for the defunding of the post office as a matter of philosophical principle. There were many plans for its abolition. None of them came to fruition. The postal system had a monopoly
over the delivery of first-class mail, which is where the majority of profits are. Competitors were prosecuted by the federal government.

Then came what seemed to be a minor revision of the law. The government allowed Federal Express to deliver overnight mail at a very high price. This was not considered to be a direct threat to the post office. It was so expensive to mail packages,
or to mail a letter, via FedEx, that the government assumed FedEx would not constitute a rival. FedEx was not prosecuted. Then UPS got in on the act. Year by year, more businesses relied on FedEx and UPS to deliver what, prior to 1971, the year FedEx was founded, would have been called first-class mail.

In 1995, the first graphics interface for the World Wide Web was released to the
public. This led to the expansion of e-mail. Year by year, e-mail has eaten into the profits of the U.S. Postal Service. Between package delivery by FedEx and UPS and the effect of e-mail, Facebook, and other social media, the U.S. Postal Service is becoming the equivalent of a dead-letter office. If the Postal Service disappeared completely over the next twelve months, not many people would miss
it, other than employees of the Postal Service. The organization is now literally billions of dollars in debt. It is not a free-market institution, and it never was. It was an arm of the government even before the existence of the United States. The British government ran it.

All the calls for privatization of the Postal Service through political action failed. What undermined its monopoly
position was the back-door development of expensive overnight mail. No major restructuring of the Postal Service by the federal government was necessary to eliminate it. It has been replaced by better technologies and better services provided by the private sector.

There is an old political slogan: “You can’t beat something with nothing.” All the calls by conservatives and libertarians
to reform the post office fell on deaf ears. The public did not see that there could be any alternative to the post office. Voters could not visualize a world without it. Nevertheless, over the past decade, the post office has steadily faded in importance, yet hardly anybody has noticed. It became an anachronism in full public view. The free market provided alternatives, and people shifted their
business to those alternatives without even thinking about the effects this would have on the most ancient government monopoly in the United States.

Here is the most effective system of reform:
voluntary replacement
. It is reform that nobody notices. It is reform that the established monarchs of a government-run system cannot effectively fight. They cannot effectively call the public
to defend the entrenched government system when the public barely understands or cares that the system is slowly disappearing.

I propose a comparable reform of the existing system of education. I propose the creation of cost-effective rival educational systems in the private sector. The free market has already begun to do this. Over
the next generation, we are going to see the replacement of the existing public school systems, from kindergarten through graduate school. This will not be a result of a systematic program of politics launched by conservatives and libertarians. It will not come as a result of voters going to the polls and electing state and federal representatives who will then follow the wishes of the voters and
cut all funding to government education. (To propose this sort of reform is to propose a fantasy. It did not work with the U.S. Postal Service, and it will not work with tax-funded education.)

I propose a strategy that in American football is called the end run. We need an end run around the existing educational system. This end run will come in many forms, but all of them are essentially
a single strategy: the replacement of the existing system by educational institutions and programs entirely funded by the private sector. These alternatives will eat away at support for the existing system of government education. Unless local government schools can find ways of competing against a comprehensive array of independently financed private-sector alternatives, they will fail to
maintain public support, much like the Postal Service. For the local school districts to do this, they will have to renounce all state and federal funding and thereby renounce state and federal controls. They will have to pull out of regional central school districts. In short, they will have to secede, or opt out.

Hardly anyone outside the federal government is coming to the defense
of the U.S. Postal System. There is no mass political movement in favor of restoring its complete monopoly over the delivery of first-class mail. In fact, the public would at this point be widely against that. There is no call to inject billions of dollars of federal money into a bailout of the system. There are no such calls, because the system is no longer vital to the lives of most Americans.
They will not come to the defense of something they barely appreciate.

Three developments will reform education: the restoration of family-based education, the restoration of open competition in education, and the development of educational programs that rely on self-teaching and student-run tutorials. In short, the division of labor in education through decentralization. I explore
all three in part 2.