Edutheria

A child is a potential man. Man is characterized by the fact that he acts and that he has morality. To act is to behave with purpose: using reason to willfully choose between alternative means toward ends. Morality is a set of feelings which constrain action. Newborn infants do not act; their behaviors are involuntary responses to internal urges and external stimuli. And since they do not act, they cannot have moral constraints on action. The maturation of the soul is the gradual actualization of the child’s potential to be a man: that is, the gradual development of purpose, will, reason, and morality. In the later stages of childhood, the child has imperfect purpose (his ends will tend to be capricious), imperfect will (he will tend to be diverted from his ends by his innate urges), imperfect reason (he will tend to choose less than optimal, or even ineffective means to his ends), and imperfect morality (his urges will tend to override his moral feelings). Manhood is more of a continuum than a discrete state. The more developed is one’s purpose, will, reason, and morality, the more one is a man. Learning is the part of maturation which is fostered by sensory input and the processing of sensory input. Parenting is the involvement of others in the process of general maturation. Education is the involvement of others in the process of learning. The state tries to parent and educate the children of its citizens. It does so for its own ends. Therefore, it tries to make its own ends the ends of the child, and tries to inculcate a false morality conducive to its own ends. The state is inherently incompetent and indolent, so it does an ineffective job at fostering the faculties of will and reason in the child. The best educators of a child are his biological parents or those who have wholly taken on the responsibilities of parenthood. Such parents have an overwhelming Darwinian imperative to foster the success of the child for ITS OWN sake. The next best educators of a child are professional educators who, in addition to having certain fields of expertise, have an overwhelming market imperative to satisfy the parents as customers.

We as a society have abdicated parenthood. We have handed parenthood over to the state. The prime responsibility of raising children to become decent, humane, and successful adults has been given over to state schools.

Kids’ lives are dominated by school. They spend about 6 hours a day at school, and then about 1 hour on homework. The parent’s daily role has been relegated to hectoring their child into meeting the demands of the school: to “wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth so you can get to school on time“; and to “get all your homework done, and study for that test, so you can get good grades at school.” The only daily meaningful interaction between parent and child is relegated to dinner: a tiny sliver of time in the day in which parents are enjoined to ask their kids, “How was your day at school.”

This grip that the state has over the lives of kids not only strangles the parent-child relationship, it heavily proscribes nearly any other non-school-related fruitful relationship the child can have. The state, through laws and the overwhelming demands of the school, does not allow the child to work or to freely pursue extra-curricular passions.

And what is the effect on our children of the state’s utter domination over their lives? In short, in makes our children improvident, shallow, incurious, and often immoral.

And it’s no wonder. Instead of the vibrant, multi-layered, rich and loving relationships that a child would have if he were enmeshed in the world of his parents, relatives, friends-of-family, and business-parters-of-family, the child is stuck in the pernicious modern-day relationship of schoolteacher-and-student. This relationship is characterized by indolence, apathy, and impotence. The indolence and apathy comes from the fact that teachers tend to have the mentality of the bureaucratic sinecure-holder. They don’t have the overwhelming Darwinian drive to improve the lot of their students that family members naturally have. And, in their padded and privileged role, neither do they have any entrepreneurial or competitive drive to maximally satisfy their customers. The impotence comes from the very format of the formal school. For the bulk of every day, each child gets 1/20th - 1/30th of the attention of one adult. No matter how “innovatively” you reform it, such a format is pure pedagogical poverty. And the rest of the day (recess, after-school hanging out, etc) is a “Lord of the Flies”-type scene of unguided, poorly-raised children reinforcing the worst aspects of each other’s character.

Life in such a dysfunctional camp is an unnatural life of no meaningful consequences. The real-world realm of helping out parents, friends of parents, and other employers with work and home affairs gives a child a true sense of accomplishment (”look at how awesome this room looks now”; “alright, son, business is booming!”) and a true sense of consequences (”Sorry, kid, if you don’t do the work, I can’t keep you on”). The artificial, unnatural realm of the school only has faux-accomplishments and faux-consequences. And kids (especially as they get older) see right through them. That is why they become apathetic about accomplishment and responsibilities, and completely shallow regarding the real world, caring only for friends and play.

In his highly important monograph Education: Free and Compulsory, Murray Rothbard tells the history of how (and why) the state progressively weaned us off parenthood: through compulsory schooling laws and an intra-school movement toward “educating the whole child”. As should be entirely manifest to anyone with a shred of skepticism regarding pro-state-schooling propaganda and an open eye to local and world news, the state has made for a wretched parent. It is time we take our children back.