The public school system in America has become a dismal failure.
But education in many other times and cultures has been quite
successful. The ancient Greeks, whose civilization was at its
height around 500 B.C., founded Western civilization as we know
it. The Athenian Greeks invented or perfected logic, drama,
science, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, literature, and
much more. Yet ancient Greece had no compulsory schools.
Other than requiring two years of military training for young
men that began at age eighteen, Athens let parents educate their
children as they saw fit. Parents either taught their children
at home or sent them to voluntary schools where teachers and
philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle gave lectures
to all who wanted to learn. These great teacher-philosophers did
not need a license to teach, nor did they have tenure.
The ancient Athenians had a free-market education system. The
thought of compulsory, state-run schools and compulsory
licensing would have been repulsive to them. The Athenians
respected a parents’ natural right to direct the education of
their children.
In contrast, Sparta, Athens’s mortal enemy, created the first
truly state-run, compulsory education system on record.
Individual Spartans lived and died for the state, and had to
serve the state from birth until sixty years of age. Their
society was a brutal military dictatorship in which male
children literally belonged to the city, not to their parents.
The Spartan military government took boys from their homes and
parents at the age of seven and forced them to live in
military-style barracks for the rest of their lives. Spartan men
were life-long soldiers whose highest duty was to obey the
commands of their leaders.
It is no coincidence that Sparta had compulsory, state-run
education. If a society believes that children belong not to
parents, but to the state, then the state must control
children’s education by compulsion.
Are our public schools any different than the brutal Spartan
society in the way they treat parents and children? Today,
school compulsory-attendance laws force parents to hand over
their children to government employees called teachers for eight
to twelve years.
In effect, our local and state governments claim that they, like
the Spartans, own our children's minds and bodies for twelve
years. Parents who refuse to hand over their children to the
public schools can be and have been locked in jail for
disobeying the compulsory-attendance laws.
In this respect, our public schools today are just as brutal as
the Spartans. The difference is only in degree. Where the
Spartans stole children from their parents to serve a lifetime
in their military, our local governments create laws that let
them, in effect, legally kidnap our children to serve twelve
years in their education boot camps called public schools. The
brutality of the principal is the same. Like the Spartans, our
public-school officials think they own our children, and have
contempt for parents' rights.
Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.
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