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THE HARSH TRUTH ABOUT GOVERNMENT
SCHOOLS
By Steven Yates
http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates100.html
Bruce Shortt, The Harsh
Truth About Public Schools (Vallecito, Calif:
Chalcedon Foundation,
2004).
Bruce Shortt has written what may be this decade’s definitive
critique of the government-sponsored school system in this country. Shortt is a member of the South Carolina-based
Exodus Mandate network. Along
with T.C. Pinckney (who penned the forward) he was one of the co-sponsors of the recent resolution put before the
Southern Baptist Convention to remove Christian children from government schools. The resolution was not adopted,
but drew nationwide attention to the issue of our rapidly deteriorating government schools. Shortt’s book is aimed
primarily at Christian parents, but can be read and appreciated by non-Christians.
Shortt draws on hundreds of sources ranging from newspaper
reports to scientific studies. His topics include (1) the anti-Christian bias in government schools; (2) the
"mainstreaming" of homosexuality in them; (3) the longstanding dumbing down of government schools, including
manipulated test scores and statistics as well as the long-term growth of an anti-academic mindset; (4) the
breakdown of discipline and the rise of violence, as well as the underreporting of violent crime in government
schools; (5) the war against boys, a chief component of radical feminist incursions; (6) the use of legal
mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac; (7) many others. Shortt has a look at a number of "school reform"
efforts, argues that they are delusions, and concludes by contending that the time has come to speak out against
government schools with our feet. He has ready responses for Christian parents who would claim (for example) that
they do not have time or the resources to homeschool their children, and for Christian teachers who would maintain
that they have an obligation to remain in government schools to ensure a Christian presence in them.
The history of how we got into this mess has been told many
times before, so I will be as brief as possible. State-sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of
this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory,
state-sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned
in the U.S. Constitution. There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when
Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been
to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens
than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools
considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the
state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state. Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first
influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be
separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the
products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever
was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was
that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of
educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing
consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of
state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an
unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.
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