American progressivism was heavily influenced by authoritarian and socialist Prussian policies
The U.S. public school system is based on the nineteenth-century Prussian model
Public education strives to turn students into useful servants of the state
The literature documenting the ideas that created Indian socialism provides some wonderful reading—philosophical, deeply moral, deeply serious. Reading the words of Mohandas K. Gandhi, one sincerely wishes that the humane essence of his vision could have been implemented without the immiseration of the very people Gandhi’s swadeshi was intended to elevate. Gandhi was a moral giant, just as Marx, in his way, was a moral giant—each had a plan to radically transform the world with the effect of bettering the lives of the poor. The problem, as the Austrian economists argued, is not so much with the content of THE PLAN, and not necessarily with the moral intent of the men who draw up THE PLAN, but with the fact of THE PLAN itself.
Unlike India, Hong Kong was very lucky in having its affairs shaped by two men who were not moral giants but who did have full command of a crucial piece of wisdom: “In the long run,” wrote Sir John James Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s financial secretary from 1961 to 1971, “the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”1
In Hong Kong, this idea is known as “positive non-interventionism,” and it was the bedrock of the city-state’s nearly unprecedented economic success. Cowperthwaite’s sentiments were echoed by his successor, Sir Charles Phillip Haddon-Cave, who hewed closely to Hayek’s view: “Positive non-interventionism involves taking the view that it is normally futile and damaging to the growth rate of an economy, particularly an open economy, for the government to attempt to plan the allocation of resources available to the private sector and to frustrate the operation of market forces.”2 That’s a kind of wisdom that lacks the satisfying moral charge of Gandhi’s view, or the romantic declarations of the socialists who throughout history have claimed to labor on behalf of the poor and the exploited.
The United States, for many cultural reasons, has long been resistant to highly romanticized political ideologies, preferring instead to follow its own Anglo-Protestant model of classical liberalism, one not far removed from the “positive non-interventionism” of Cowperthwaite and Haddon-Cave. But the United States has not been entirely immune, to be sure—such phenomena as the Ku Klux Klan, the survivalist/militia movement, the sixties counterculture, the Black Panthers, and the utopian communities that dotted the American landscape in the nineteenth century are expressions of a deep political romanticism, as were more mainstream developments such as Kennedy’s “Camelot,” FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and the contemporary, right-wing, anti-trade and anti-globalization faction associated with Pat Buchanan and the American Conservative. That romanticism, which always necessitates a rejection of positive non-interventionism, is not a left-right, liberal-conservative development in the United States. Libertarian and paleoconservative critics are right to point to an axis of romanticism that runs from Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivism to George W. Bush’s determination to rid the world, or at least the world’s governments, of evil.
Perhaps the most romantic movement in American political history—and, not accidentally, the most European movement—was the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, which combined the pragmatism of the American spirit with the German romanticism that undergirded the Prussian model of government under Otto von Bismarck, the patron saint of progressivism. Conservative and libertarian critics of American progressivism, notably Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg, have explored the intellectual and political linkages between the policies pursued by the contemporary Left and those pursued by Bismarck and, more to the point, to his more radical political epigones, who range from Lenin to Mussolini, but include, most notably, the democratic socialists.
This line of criticism often is met with flat rejection and no small amount of derision: “How could any thinking person link Bismarck and the socialists?” they demand. “Bismarck was the sworn enemy of the socialists.” And that is true, so far as it goes—which is not very far.
“[In Prussia] administration has been most studied and most nearly perfected. Frederic the Great, stern and masterful as was his rule, still sincerely professed to regard himself as only the chief servant of the state, to consider his great office a public trust; and it was he who, building upon the foundations laid by his father, began to organize the public service of Prussia as in very earnest a service of the public. His no less absolute successor, Frederic William III . . . in his turn, advanced the work still further, planning many of the broader structural features which give firmness and form to Prussian administration today. Almost the whole of the admirable system has been developed by kingly initiative.”
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Woodrow Wilson, The Study of Administration, 1886
Bismarck was deeply troubled by the emerging influence of the Social Democratic Party and in particular its radical wing, whose members had been linked to the attempted assassination of Kaiser Wilhelm. The Iron Chancellor, much more closely allied in the historic mind with German nationalism than with German socialism, adopted the Sozialistengesetze, a set of legal reforms specifically designed to suffocate the Social Democratic Party by forbidding its members to meet, shuttering its newspapers and journals, dissolving unions affiliated with the movement, and similarly repressive measures.
The most illuminating political analogy here is the rift between the Stalin and Trotsky factions in the Soviet Union. The Stalinists were socialists and the Trotskyists were socialists; they were merely competing factions fighting for power. Bismarck’s longrunning battle with the Social Democratic Party in fact tells us very little about Bismarck’s ideological kinship with, or aversity toward, socialism as we now understand it.
Let us go ahead and grant that Bismarck was no socialist in the sense that we are using that word here—he did not advocate the public ownership of capital, the suppression of private property, the establishment of a classless society, or any of the other fundamental goals that socialism purports to pursue. Bismarck called his philosophy, such as it was, Realpolitik, which we might render in English as pragmatism. In Bismarck’s time, that meant “The Great Game,” the fine art of balancing the major European powers, playing each off against the others. But there was a domestic side to Realpolitik, too; even as his government was laboring to suppress the Social Democratic Party, Bismarck was busily enacting those parts of its agenda that he thought would serve his own purposes by pacifying the poor and the working classes.
It was Realpolitik, and not romantic socialism, that thereby led to the establishment of Europe’s first major welfare state as Bismarck oversaw the creation of a social-insurance program, a health-insurance entitlement, old-age pensions, disability benefits, and restrictive labor laws. These were the first programs of their kind, and they were adopted in no small part to reduce the appeal of the socialist movement that was promising even more generous subsidies and benefits. Bismarck’s calculating Realpolitik caught the attention of another group of political visionaries inclined to describe themselves as pragmatists, though today we know them more commonly as the progressives.
“The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.”
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Otto von Bismarck, Prussian autocrat and intellectual godfather of American progressivism
The most prominent of them were John Dewey, America’s leading public intellectual, and Woodrow Wilson, the Bryn Mawr and Princeton don who went on to become president of the United States. But well before these men found themselves intoxicated by the allure of masterful Prussian pragmatism, they were beaten to the discovery by Horace Mann, known today as the father of the American public school system, the most notable island of socialism in the once-uproarious, presently diminishing sea of American capitalism.
While the Prussian model of education would eventually come to be adopted in the United States, the public provision of schooling in America far precedes the establishment of the country itself. The later Prussian-style schooling would be explicitly presented as a component of national economic planning; students would be taught skills that would make them productive workers, national examinations would be used to channel them into suitable jobs, and the whole enterprise would be integrated into a rational plan of economic development. This was the essence of the progressive vision for education. But the earliest public schooling project in the United States had a very different goal: to curb the influence of Satan.
The first public-education law in the United States was the “Old Deluder Satan Law,” named for its citation of Old Hickory in its opening passage. Unlike most of our modern laws, this 1647 statute is quite readable, and it is worth considering in full:
It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general, by way of supply, as the major part of those that order the prudentials of the town shall appoint; provided those that send their children be not oppressed by paying much more than they can have them taught for in other towns. And it is further ordered, that when any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university, provided that if any town neglect the performance hereof above one year that every such town shall pay 5 pounds to the next school till they shall perform this order.3
Hayek had a lot to say about central planning as an approach to economic problems, but very little to say about it as a strategy for fighting Satan. It only takes a little reading between the lines, however, to decode the language and discover the true intent of this law. The program being described by the Old Deluder Satan Law is not about instruction in the liberal arts, but about indoctrination—indoctrination literally, as Christians use the word—using the schools, under political discipline, to enforce uniformity of opinion, which is to say: conformity of all opinion with the official dogma of the governing powers. Public schools have served the same function ever since.
This was hardly unprecedented. The first mandatory-education laws appeared in Germany in the sixteenth century, and the schools were used to impose Lutheran orthodoxy on heterogeneous populations. Martin Luther himself was an energetic advocate of mandatory education as a means of enforcing religious orthodoxy, and the teacup totalitarian John Calvin had similar ideas in Geneva. The Empress Maria Theresa in Austria, another monarch struggling with religious dissent, was quick to adopt the Prussian model and use it to impose orthodoxy. The Soviet Union would later adopt compulsory education for much the same reason, though it was imposing a rather different kind of orthodoxy.
The Austrian economist Murray Rothbard quotes Luther’s argument for the establishment of compulsory schools:
I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. . . . If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities.4
And that argument was easily mutated into a less religious and more explicitly statist formulation by the progressive thinker Calvin Stowes, who was influential in seeing the Prussian model adopted in the United States:
If a regard to the public safety makes it right for a government to compel the citizens to do military duty when the country is invaded, the same reason authorizes the government to compel them to provide for the education of their children . . . . A man has no more right to endanger the state by throwing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children, than he has to give admission to the spies of an invading army.5
The leap from doing war with Satan (who was euphemistically referred to as “The Enemy”) to doing war with the Enemy of the State was a very short and brief one, and it illustrates an important point about public education, which is that its point is not educating the public. The point of public education is, and has always been, to make members of the public better and more productive servants of the state—and it is therefore unsurprising that socialists have taken up the cause. President Obama, speaking to an audience of schoolchildren, described in some detail how he expects the schools to produce students that will serve the needs of the state; unsurprisingly, he cast the situation in terms of his own agenda, emphasizing healthcare, racial discrimination, and job-creation:
What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills, and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that—if you quit on school—you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.6
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. . . . We are either trying to make liberally educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do.”
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Woodrow Wilson, speech to high-school teachers’ convention, 1909
Obama here is describing a right of eminent domain over the lives of American children, without putting it quite in those words. Other social-education activists have been more explicit, and it is undeniable that the public provision of educational services is understood today, and has always been understood, as a component of national economic planning.
It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. When some parents objected to the Obama speech quoted above being broadcast into all the nation’s government-run schools, on the grounds that it constituted political indoctrination, they were roundly mocked by the Left. One diarist at the left-wing website Daily Kos, noting that some of Obama’s critics had described his platform as a “socialist agenda,” wrote, “If your kids are in public school, they’re already living that agenda.”7 To make his point especially clear, he headlined the post, “Public Schools Are Socialist.”
Likewise, writing in a forum for The Nation titled “Reimagining Socialism,” Emory University history professor Patrick Allitt cited public schools as evidence that “millions of Americans . . . are ardent supporters of socialism.” “It’s odd,” he wrote, “that so many critics of [the Obama] administration should use ‘socialism’ as a devil word.”8 Devil word: perhaps he’s never heard of the Old Deluder Satan Law.
At any rate, this is a common trope on the Left: “socialism” sounds scary, but we’re really talking about things like public schools and public highways. Education blogger Jerry Webster, writing at About.com, headlined his post on nationalizing teacher-pay decisions “Give Socialism a Chance.”9 Writing in the arts and humanities journal Helium, Daniel Reneau asks, “Like public schools? Then say, ‘Thank you, socialism!’”10 Other writers on the Left have similarly argued that the popularity of the public schools suggests that Americans are more comfortable with socialism than they let on.
As indeed they are. The public schools constitute one of the most popular instantiations of socialism in American life, though Social Security and government-funded transportation systems no doubt rank nearly as high. But popular with whom? Certainly the educators and administrators who run the system are largely pleased with it, as they should be; the noncompetitive nature of government-run education provides them with salaries and benefits far exceeding what they plausibly could earn in the private sector. Some parents and property owners are very happy with the public schools as well. The well-off and well-connected tend to enjoy reasonably good public schools, which help sustain high residential real estate values in the largely suburban communities that host them.
But other Americans are much less pleased with their government schools, particularly the poor, non-whites, and those living in inner cities. Black families in particular consistently rate their government schools as performing poorly, and their subjective impressions are borne out by empirical data. Writing in 1973, Murray Rothbard understood that this was a socialist central-planning problem of the classical variety:
Bureaucratic convenience has invariably led the states to prescribe geographical public school districts, to place one school in each district, and then to force each public school child to attend school in the district closest to his residence. . . . The present system compels a monopoly of one school per district, and thereby coerces uniformity throughout each area. Children who, for whatever reason, would prefer to attend a school in another district are prohibited from doing so. The result is enforced geographic homogeneity, and it also means that the character of each school is completely dependent on its residential neighborhood. It is then inevitable that public schools, instead of being totally uniform, will be uniform within each district, and the composition of pupils, the financing of each school, and the quality of education will come to depend upon the values, the wealth, and the tax base, of each geographical area. The fact that wealthy school districts will have costlier and higher-quality teaching, higher teaching salaries, and better working conditions than the poorer districts, then becomes inevitable. Teachers will regard the better schools as the superior teaching posts, and the better teachers will gravitate to the better school districts, while the poorer ones must remain in the lower-income areas. Hence, the operation of district public schools inevitably results in the negation of the very egalitarian goal which is supposed to be a major aim of the public school system in the first place.11
Rothbard goes on to cite nineteenth-century public-schooling advocate Newton Bateman, who called for a socialist model of mandatory schooling; education, he wrote, was too important to be left to the marketplace, a good that “cannot be left to the caprices and contingencies of individuals.”12 Prefiguring President Obama, he cited the state’s “right of eminent domain” over the “hearts and minds and bodies” of the nation’s children in support of his case.13
Bateman’s reasoning was extended to its natural conclusion in the state of Oregon, which attempted not only to create mandatory government schools but in 1922 tried to ban all private schools as well, citing the need to provide a uniform education that would make good citizens and productive workers of all its wards. The driving force behind the proposal was the Ku Klux Klan, which wanted to make sure that new immigrants, particularly Catholics, were sufficiently Americanized—by which they presumably meant much the same thing that Martin Luther had meant, i.e. that they should be conformed to the religious-political orthodoxy of the time. The particular content of that orthodoxy has changed from time to time—Robert Dale Owen, another progressive-era proponent of state-run education, wrote of a “national, rational, republican education, for the honor, the happiness, the virtue, and the salvation of the state.”14 But what has remained constant is that the political mission of the socialist education system in the United States dominates its nominal educational mission.
Sheldon Friedman of the Freeman cites a particularly brazen expression of that fact in an article touching on public-school advocate William Seawell, a professor at the University of Virginia, who argued that state schools, unlike private schools, “promote civic rather than individual pursuits . . . creating citizens for the good of society. . . . Each child belongs to the state.”15 A Venezuelan oil rig, a Russian wheat field, an American child—all the property of the state, all grist for the socialist central-planning mill. Friedman noted that this sentiment was echoed in an even more illiberal promise from Winnie Mandela, the South African politician who gave campaign speeches promising that “parents not sending their children to school will be the first prisoners” of her government.16
Despite the wildly exaggerated claims made by partisans of socialist education, its results in the United States are similar to the results of the socialist cartels in India or the socialist collective farms of the USSR: resources are misallocated or squandered, the programs’ intended beneficiaries are shortchanged, and the interests of the central planners themselves are those that are most astutely upheld. The inner-city schools are a nightmare from coast to coast. Education spending has skyrocketed while educational outcomes have stagnated in many schools and declined in many others. The first state to adopt a mandatory public education program, Massachusetts, had a higher literacy rate in 1850, the year it adopted its compulsory-attendance law, than it does today.
“Without comparative studies in government we cannot rid ourselves of the misconception that administration stands upon an essentially different basis in a democratic state from that on which it stands in a non-democratic state.”
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Woodrow Wilson, The Study of Administration, 1886
The public schools of Medfield, Massachusetts, recently invited parents to participate in the development of a five-year plan—what is it with statists and five-year plans?—and it’s an instructive case study. Medfield is about as good as you could ask for when it comes to public schools. It’s an extraordinarily affluent community, with an average household income above $100,000 and average home valuations (the basis of public-school revenue) above a half-million dollars. It’s very wealthy and very white—so white that it does not even disaggregate test scores for black or Hispanic students. It spends a tremendous amount of money per student, an amount comparable to the tuition at many good private schools.
So, how is socialism working out in the Medfield schools? To take one typical example, the district’s “report card” under the No Child Left Behind law reports that fourth-grade math scores are much lower than one would expect in such a high-flying community. Fourteen percent of students were graded “advanced,” 36 percent “proficient,” 45 percent “needs improvement,” and 4 percent “warning,” the lowest rating offered. Even taking out the extremes, there are nearly one-third more students in the non-proficient category than in the proficient category.
Overall, the state of Massachusetts has highly rated public schools, a fact attended by much rhetoric about serving the poor and the disadvantaged. Statewide, Massachusetts’s fourth-grade math-score breakdown for black students is: 5 percent advanced, 20 percent proficient, 51 percent needs improvement, 25 percent warning. Notably, the scores for black students are even worse, marginally, than the scores for low-income students, whose breakdown is: 6 percent advanced, 22 percent proficient, 51 percent needs improvement, and 22 percent warning.
And these are among the best state-run schools in the country. The situation is much worse in other states, particularly for black and low-income students. The Wall Street Journal reports, “In the year 2000’s standardized NAEP test for math achievement, this is the percentage of black eighth graders who passed respectively in some famous states: New York, 8%; California, 6%; Michigan, 6%; Tennessee, 6%; Texas, 7%; Arkansas, 2%. Indeed the national average for black eighth graders is 6% compared to 40% for white students, a 34% achievement gap.”17
Why would black parents and poor parents be “ardent supporters of socialism,” to use Professor Allitt’s words, when school socialism produces those kinds of results? The truth is they aren’t. School-choice programs are wildly popular with black families and poor families; the Washington, D.C. scholarship program, recently destroyed by congressional Democrats at the behest of the teachers’ unions, had thousands of applications for each of its handful of slots. The results strongly indicated that the students were achieving far superior educational outcomes under the private-school program than they were in the socialist schools. The Washington Post reports, “Students awarded vouchers to attend private schools in the District had significantly better chances of graduating from high school, and parents who sent their children to schools using scholarships were happy with having a choice of good, safe schools. These latest findings on D.C. school vouchers underscore the value of this program and show how wrong-headed it is to deny future students this opportunity.”18 But future students are indeed being denied the opportunity, and they will be sentenced to 13-year terms in Washington’s failed and failing socialist schools. Why?
If the well-off and white in leafy Medfield, Massachusetts, cannot make a socialist five-year plan work for their state-run schools, it is unlikely that the largely poor urban blacks in Washington’s schools will be able to, either. If the knowledge problem identified by Mises and Hayek make rational central planning impossible for something as simple as a quart of milk, what chance do central planners have to make rational, effective plans for something as complex and difficult as educating the children of a diverse nation of more than 300 million?
The educational establishment claims a “right of eminent domain” over the “hearts, minds, and bodies” of the children, but to what end? Clearly, the end is not education, and it never was—not from the time of Martin Luther and the Old Deceiver Satan Law forward. The interests of the children in the socialist education system are no more being served than were the interests of the millions of Indians consigned to poverty by their socialist rulers or the interests of Venezuelans who were left hungry as tons of food mouldered away in the warehouses of Hugo Chávez’s socialist government.
So, whose interests are served under socialism? That vital question is the topic of the next chapter.