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Education in the United States of America (USA) has become a prison, a factory, a fraud that dumbs down the vast majority with compulsory rote education of little value in a rapidly chaning world. Within the Cabinet of the USA, Education is a sideshow, a neglected step-child vastly overshadowed by a $1 trillion a year national security budget and the insanity of a White House that thinks theater is a substitute for thinking, sabre-rattling a substitute for production.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had it right. Jefferson said “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry” to which we would add “and armed”). James Madison, whose statement we have adopted as the foundation for this Public Intelligence Blog, is even more specific: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

In 1916 in his doctoral thesis published as Philosophy and the Social Problem, Will Durant said this:

In his view so early in his career, philosophy plus history equals wisdom; and politics without either cannot resolve “the social problem” regardless of how much money might be thrown at specific solutions.

“When Plato says that the office of minister of education is ‘of all the great offices of state the greatest,' and that the citizens should elect their very best man to this office (Laws 765-6), he is not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, revolutionary proposition.

Paraphrase to shorten: A system of education controlled by the government teaches the eleventh commandment NOT given by God: “thy country right or wrong.” For the monied class, it creates workers skilled at labor but unable to think for themselves. “The ignorant, it seems, are the necessary balance for the ship of state.” page 128

More recently, we find that the Libertarian tradition is most in keeping with the views of our Founding Fathers and our most able philosophers.

Ludwig van Mises and the Ludwig van Mises Institute have this to say about education:

Education: Free and Compulsory

Mises Daily by Murray N. Rothbard | Posted on 9/9/2006 12:00:00 AM

In a fundamental sense, as a matter of fact, everyone is “self-educated.”

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

Individuality is suppressed by teaching all to adjust to the “group.”

Read the entire monograph via the headline link or individual pieces below.