I find there exactly the same evils that are rampant in the world — centralized education programs, the subservience of the church to the state, contempt for the rights of minorities, standardization of everything, suppression of intellectual adventure….I see more clearly than ever before that unless the gospel is true and there is another world, our souls are in prison. The gospel of Christ is a blessed relief from that sinful state of affairs commonly known as hundred per-cent Americanism.

 

–Stonehouse, Machen: A Biographical Memoir

The other quote is from his book The Christian Faith in the Modern World. Here he talks about the danger of losing our liberty and freedom in the name of national security. Anybody think that he would have subjected himself to a TSA naked body scanner? I don’t think so.

Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state.

 

–Machen, The Christian Faith in the Modern World

Don’t hold your breath to hear those quotes in Sunday School class anytime soon.

I have come to the conclusion that this setup of paying for chores is sort of odd. Think about it for a minute. Who pays you when you do chores? Nobody. You do chores because they are the daily ploddings of life that all people must do. You don’t get rewarded, or reimbursed for it. You do, however, get reimbursed for the time and labour you spend at your job. The reason is that, in your job function, you are representing a capital labour investment for someone else who pays you for his use of your time and effort. To put it more simply, you don’t do somebody elses chores, you do your chores. But, at a job, you do someone else’s work(the capitalist’s or entrepenuer’s) for them. And they pay you for it.

Now, if the ultimate goal of raising our children is to prepare them properly for life as an adult, then we need to mirror as closely as possible the real world that they will be living in. Remember, that’s why we homeschool to begin with – because real life doesn’t resemble the fake world of government school classrooms. At your job, you don’t get segregated into age-peer groups, so you shouldn’t be grouped that way when your raised either. Now, import the concept of wages into this same scenario. It wouldn’t fit to pay your child for doing chores, but not for their job(school). When we do it that way, we are unwittingly teaching them a fallacious, labour theory of value. We are teaching them that you get paid based on how hard you work. That’s not true.

We get paid, not based on how hard we work, but on how productive we are. Let me demonstrate. Imagine you have five employees that all do the same job(just make up something, like data entry). Two of them are extremely fast typists, and it only takes them an hour to input 50 documents. The other three are slower and it takes them an hour and a half to input the same 50 documents. In this scenario, the second, slower, group works much harder than the faster group to achieve the same results. But, you would think it silly to say that the second group deserves higher wages than the first. In fact, the first group should be paid more, because they are more productive. This enhanced productivity brings a higher return to the capitalist(you), so you can pay them more.

If we pay our kids for their school work, it reinforces the correct idea that wages are a marginal product based on how productive they are. It’s not enough to just put a bunch of junk down on the paper. They have to get the answers right and do it in an ever-increasing efficient manner. If they don’t, they don’t get paid. What matters is output, not labour or even effort. Some kids are naturally gifted in a certain subject like math. That is a benefit to them. The fact that getting the right answers comes easily to them is irrelevant. As long as our kids get the answers right, and show a pattern of solving the same problems quicker over time, they get paid 10 cents per lesson, because that is evidence that they are learning what is being taught. And that’s their job right now.

First, why pay kids for doing school work? It seems like such an odd thing to do. After all, we didn’t get paid for going to school. We just had to grin and bear it. But, as we should all keep in mind, just because the majority of people do something a certain way doesn’t make it the best way to do said thing. We should always be on the lookout for ways to improve the things we take for granted. And, that’s one of the brilliant things about homeschooling. We get to experiment with all kinds of techniques to reach the kids with a greater level of educational realism. That’s what led us into thinking about all of this. A desire to make our children’s education have the most real, practical effect. We wanted the act of educating, itself to be instructive and realistic.

So, with that in mind we thought about how the modern educational process is treated so differently than every other real-world experience we have. Just think about it for a moment. What is primary education really saying to our kids? It’s saying, because you are young, you must go and work for 8 hours a day, plus nights and weekends(for homework) without pay for twelve years of your life. If you don’t do this, the state will do bad things to you and/or your parents. Now, can you think of any other institution that resembles this? I can. It’s called slavery.

Now, I know that your knee-jerk response to this claim is that I’m crazy, because “this is different.” Or, “they’re getting an education.” Or, “it’s for the child’s own benefit.” Or, “education has X number of external benefits, so it’s worth it.” I could probably think of a dozen other statements like this that people would probably think of when I claim that mandatory elementary education is just like slavery. But, I hope that you will stop and think about it for a moment and realize that all of those statements are true for slavery as well. You could say, “they’re learning a skill.” Or, “they’re getting three meals a day and shelter.” My basic premise is that no matter how you try and make mandatory education different than slavery, you can’t. It all ultimately boils down to forced labor.

This is the premise we came to the table with. We thought in this way: if we force our children to do work, the moral thing to do is pay them a wage for that work. Work without pay is slavery. Remember, though, not all pay comes in the form of money. When I talk of paying them a wage(10 cents per lesson in our case), that wage could come in another form also. It could come in the form of food, play time/free time, getting to stay up a bit later before bed, etc. In fact, that’s going to be the subject of the next post.

Stand to Reason – September 27th, Greg Koukl:

Here are some of the stats that stood out to me the most:

This is all well and good, but the things that most interested me were the ones dealing with family household income and parent education level. Those are two of the most oft-cited reasons people give for not homeschooling, and for criticizing others who do. The idea that parents can’t do a good job of teaching their children because they don’t have a teaching certificate or that it’s somehow only for the rich gets absolutely crushed by these numbers:

That last stat is joy to my eyes. If homeschooling actually lives up to what it claims to, then we would expect those numbers to be exactly what they are. What I mean is, if public education is inherently limited in it’s results, then it shouldn’t make a difference whether a public school endorsed teaching program is completed by the parent. I can vouch that the homeschooling parent learns as much through teaching as the children do. My wife, for example, has already learned a new math system in order to teach my little girl, and she’s been pouring over Egyptian history text books for weeks now in order to boil down the important parts into a 1st grade level for teaching to the kids. This is the same thing that teachers have to do when they teach a new subject. You don’t actually think that a basketball coach who teaches a history class actually has a degree in history do you? Unlikely. No, they follow a curriculum.

I’ve said it before that all you need to start homeschooling is the internet and to love your kids. We need more kids these days to be raised outside “the system.”

This type of thinking is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in education. Somehow, education is looked upon differently than all other human endeavors. It’s assumed that unless there is a grand, unifying curriculum that everyone follows then somehow children will end up less than ideally educated. Take post-bellum Peabody Trust advocate and Alabama congressman Jabez Curry for example:

Curry is lamenting the “unsystematic” structure and lack of “unity” in pre-war schools. This is a common complaint we here from government types. Lack of uniformity and cetralization is always frowned upon as less than efficient, and generally unfavorable. But, in real life. The life lived by non-beuracrats. Diversity and decentralization is always not only preferable, but necessary to get the job done. The free and open market operates, to borrow a phrase from Eric Raymond, as a bazaar. Many voices and agents acting in their own self interest will end up creating a unified whole called a marketplace. This marketplace cannot function when all agents act uniformly as one. Something like that isn’t a marketplace. It’s a religion.

But, the natural question arises: why would we want schools to resemble a marketplace? The short answer is because markets are where innovation happens. Let me give you a somewhat lengthy example. When little Johnny’s daddy, who is a farmer, is in the middle of harvest season, he really needs Johnny on the farm helping instead of in school learning about Greek mythology. Why is this somehow wrong? It’s not like when Johnny isn’t in school he’s locked in a closet, cut off from the world. No. Little Johnny is getting a thoroughly well rounded education in that scenario. One where he learns practical life skills, agriculture and business to compliment any classroom learning he may receive. So, let’s assume for the sake of example that this is a liberal school and allows Johnny to stay at home and help his dad.

Now suppose he comes back to school after harvest and tells his teacher that he and his father figured out how to handle a complex problem that they were faced with on the farm the previous week. As he describes the problem and tells the solution, his teacher realizes that this is similar to a particular classroom difficulty he’s been struggling with. So the teacher goes about implementing a modified version of Johnny’s idea to the daily teaching method and has tremendous results. When word gets out about this, other teachers begin to implement the idea and have similar success. This is how markets innovate. But, under a top-down, unified, centralized approach, this market mentality is stunted. Innovation is only allowed by those outside of the system and then approved by a far away committee.

It’s no wonder our schools are suffering so badly. Socialism kills innovation in the economy. Why do we think importing socialist ideas into education would do anything other than kill innovation there as well?

But, on to the point. One of the forces behind public education in the post-bellum South is something he refers to as the Peabody Education Fund. That peeked my interest and I filed it away to follow up later. Well, low and behold, while reading a paper that my wife sent to me by John Taylor Gatto, I ran into a reference to “…George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South…”. So I just had to dig a little and find out who this guy was and why he was so interested in Southern schooling. After researching a little bit, I guess I should have heard of this guy before.

From what I can tell, George Peabody was a founder of the banking company that eventually became J.P. Morgan(Morgan’s son would later sit on the trust fund’s board), and also Morgan Stanley. He is considered the first “philanthropist”, in the modern sense. An extremely wealthy individual who devotes his latter years to benevolence. He sounds to me a lot like Walter Annenberg. It’s actually uncanny how close the comparison is. Down to the fact that Peabody lived his last years in London, and Annenberg was the ambassador to the U.K. in his latter years. Anyway, it looks like he created the Peabody Education Fund in 1867, and died a few years later. He set up a trust for the distribution of the money, with little or no restrictions or caveats on how it was doled out. Again, very similar to Annenberg.

I found some of his letters to the trust board in the New York Time’s archives section, and as far as I can see, the guy’s motives were honest. He seemed to genuinely believe in the cause he was starting. Things would start to change, however, in 1879 as the interest rate on government bonds slowed the amount of money that the fund was generating. The board called on a petition to the Federal government to appropriate money for Southern education initiatives. This idea would only grow as the board later included William McKinley and then later President Teddy Roosevelt. In 1883, the board said that “no private benefactions or endowments, however liberal,” would be able to meet the great need of southern education, and called again on National moneys.

In going through the trust’s report from 1880, there are some revealing things as well in the language:

So we see a few reasons here for the need for education that the trust saw. Restoring a taxable constituency and easing tensions between the haves and the have nots. Remember that this board was made up almost exclusively of business tycoons who had in their self interest, a population that was not hostile to them. This was definitely one of the aims of early public schooling, that would become even more and more prominent as the century turned. So much of the public school system can be traced directly back to wealthy magnates and tycoons such as Rockefeller, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Morgan, etc. That whole 1880 report is fascinating. Take your time to read through it when you can.

As the 19th century came to a close, the fund began to focus mostly on training teachers for the public schools. This was the subject of the meeting in 1901, as well as talk of the nature of the emerging shool system. The manager of the trust called it a “duty of government” to educate the people, and praised that the American public education was “free from ecclesiastical control” and “severed” from “sectarian domination”. It’s chilling to see that even in 1901, religion was being purged from the school system as a requirement of taking this private/government money. This only intensified as the years went on, and most Southern states bought into it hook, line and sinker.

Private classical schools and homeschool curriculums have been doing this exact thing for years. For example, one of the curriculums we are considering for our kids is the Veritas system. It uses classic art, history, classic literature and bible content to teach reading using a phonics method. The kids learn to read as they learn about all of those other subjects. That is their kindergarten material too. Until the politicians stop using the public education system as a tool of political power I guess we won’t see anything like that in state curriculum.

This is yet another reason to support vouchers for those who can’t homeschool or private school their kids. Many kids, especially in urban areas where NCLB is most targeted, are stuck in a particular school that is totally inadequate or flat out unsafe. These kids would benefit tremendously from a voucher program. I think it’s pretty obvious that NCLB was a last ditch attempt by Ted Kennedy and his fat pocketed NEA friends to stop the bleeding in the public school system before having to resort to vouchers, which would totally shake the system to it’s core.