Public education degenerates into an indoctrination tool

Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics—whatever that may be. Children who need to be able to express themselves in clear English are being taught political slogans. Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. And children who need encouragement—and children do so much need encouragement—are being taught that our society offers them no future. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life—yes, cheated.

—Margaret Thatcher. Speech to Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool, October 9, 1987.

One of the first things political parties do, upon regaining power, is to tinker with the curriculum to require indoctrination to their bent. The only way to guard against this is to allow parents the freedom to choose their own school, and therefore the curriculum their children will learn.

A public system of education creates an army of drones

Education, taken in its most extensive sense, is properly that which makes the man. One method of education, therefore, would only produce one kind of man; but the great excellence of human nature consists in the variety of which it is capable. Instead, then, of endeavoring, by uniform and fixed systems of education, to keep mankind always the same, let us give free scope to everything which may bid fair for introducing more variety among us. The various character of the Athenians was certainly preferable to the uniform character of the Spartans, or to any uniform national character whatever.

—Joseph Priestley. Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty, 1771.

It was Germany with its state education system that produced Nazism. It was privately educated Britain that resisted it. Individualism thrives where children are educated in a thousand different ways in a thousand different types of schools. People do not gather at mass rallies and chant Sieg Heil in a country where individualism is cherished. Just look at how far Oswald Mosely and his Fascist party got in Britain: the individualistic British people gave him short shrift.

Ironically, it was as a result of the two world wars forced on them by statist Germany that the British turned their back on individualism and instead embraced socialism. Nurtured from ‘cradle to the grave’, they have become more and more dronelike every decade. To recover themselves they must find the courage to renounce socialism, including renouncing public health and public education.

This article is an extract from the book ‘Principles of Good Government’ by Matthew Bransgrove