Some gemeralds here:
Not only has there been a trend toward increased State control, but the effects of this have been worsened by the very system of equality before the law that applies in political life. There has been the growth of a passion for equality in general. The result has been a tendency to regard every child as equal to every other child, as deserving equal treatment, and to impose complete uniformity in the classroom. Formerly, this had tended to be set at the average level of the class; but this being frustrating to the dullest (who, however, must be kept at the same level as the others, in the name of equality and democracy), the teaching tends more and more to be set at the lowest levels.
We shall see that since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all for- mal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the “group,” rather than the development of self-independence, for the deprecation of intellectual subjects. And finally, it is the drive of the State and its minions for power that explains the “modern education” creed of “education of the whole child” and making the school a “slice of life,” where the individual plays, adjusts to the group, etc. The effect of this, as well as all the other measures, is to repress any tendency for the development of rea- soning powers and individual independence; to try to usurp in various ways the “educational” function (apart from formal instruction) of the home and friends, and to try to mold the “whole child” in the desired paths. Thus, “modern education” has aban- doned the school functions of formal instruction in favor of mold- ing the total personality both to enforce equality of learning at the level of the least educable, and to usurp the general educational role of home and other influences as much as possible. Since no one will accept outright State “communization” of children, even in Communist Russia, it is obvious that State control has to be achieved more silently and subtly.
I disagree with the last sentence. The state is a tyranny of the median; nothing it does here is silent or subtle. It’s What The Median Wants and thinks is Good And Proper. Condemning the policies of the state without condemning the median person for voting for those policies is foolish.
The State can adhere strictly to the function of defending everyone from the aggressive violence of everyone else. This will include children as well as adults, since children are potential adults and future freemen. Simple failure to “educate,” or rather, instruct, is no grounds whatever for interference. The difference between these cases was succinctly put by Herbert Spencer:
No cause for such [state] interposition can be shown until the children’s rights have been violated, and that their rights are not violated by a neglect of their educa- tion [actually, instruction]. For…what we call rights are merely arbitrary subdivisions of the general liberty to exercise the faculties; and that only can be called an infringement of rights which actually diminishes this lib- erty—cuts off a previously existing power to pursue the objects of desire. Now the parent who is careless of a child’s education does not do this. The liberty to exercise faculties is left intact. Omitting instruction in no way takes from a child’s freedom to do whatsoever it wills in the best way it can, and this freedom is all that equity demands. Every aggression, be it remembered—every infraction of rights—is necessarily active; whilst every neglect, carelessness, omission, is as necessarily passive. Consequently, however wrong the non-performance of a parental duty may be…it does not amount to a breach of the law of equal freedom and cannot therefore be taken cognizance of by the state.
Herbert Spencer, we miss you. Only mutational load could have eradicated thinkers like him so completely. Imagine an academia filled with thinkers of similar mind as he…
Anyway, I would go one step further than Rothbard here. The state as presently conceived exists unjustly, for every naturally free man has the right to control his very own state. Therefore the territories of existing states should be chopped up into the tiniest parts possible, so that the maximum number of naturally free men can have the m…