“Welcome, one and all!”
– Tim Starr
From the archives: This was the first post ever on the then brand new email-based discussion group forum we called ‘the Taking Children Seriously List’. It was posted on 21st November, 1994
I see we’ve got some new subscribers over the weekend—welcome, one and all! I’m afraid we’re still in the final phases of getting things started here, so here’s some quotes I found on one of my favorite subjects, State schooling, to tide you over and perhaps get things started:
“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 the spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other material duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel 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 of their strong men.”
– Martin Luther, “Letter to the Rulers of Germany,” 1524
“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—for no foes are so much to be dreaded as ignorance and vice. 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. If he is unable to educate his children, the state should assist him—if unwilling, it should compel him.”
– Calvin Stowe, “The Prussian System of Public Instruction and Its Applicability to the United States,” 1830
“One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year…. It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry—especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.”
– Albert Einstein
“[The popular] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. And so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread the enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
– Henry Louis Mencken
“A healthy boy is in constant revolt against the sort of men who surround him at school. Their puerile pedantries, their Christian Endeavor respectability, their sedentary pallor, their curious preference for the dull and uninteresting… In every boy’s school the favorite teacher is the one who occasionally swears like a cavalry man, or is reputed to keep a jug in his room, or is known to receive a scented note every morning.”
– Henry Louis Mencken
“There is a general feeling that something is wrong with the public schools. The tendency is to blame the schoolma’ams. They seem to be responsible for the fact that the children learn very little and are generally bewildered. But the truth is that the schoolma’am herself is the victim. The real villains are the quacks who now run the American school system… and they ruin her as a teacher. Every year she is beset by a series of new arcana and forced to struggle with them on penalty of losing her job…. As a result teaching becomes a madness and the children learn next to nothing.”
– Henry Louis Mencken
I hope you enjoy the list!
Tim Starr
See also:
- How I came to Taking Children Seriously
- Coercing children to play an instrument
- Hand wringing instead of intervening?
Tim Starr, 1994, ‘The first list post’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-first-list-post