On the Separation of Church, Science, Education, and Business from the State: Avoiding Repressive Fascism

A suggested revision of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, scientific research, education, or business activity, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

When the state meddles, bad things happen—besides violating our rights.
 
The origin of the notion of a dividing line between church and state, or more correctly, “a theory of two powers,” as Britannica.com writes, goes back to Mark 12:13-17 when Jesus replied to questioning by the Pharisees who were attempting to trap him in a dilemma: either offend his followers by saying taxes should be paid to Rome or be arrested for treason for telling them not to pay.
 
Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17, New Living Translation).
 
Prior to this statement, church and state were inseparable. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church continued to dominate life, though by the tenth century numerous secular rulers had arisen to compete with and manipulate the Church. Over the centuries, conflict between church and state, as well as conflicts between the newly founded religious sects, led to many bloody wars. In the eighteenth century the notion of individual rights and separation of religion and state became expressed in the US’s First Amendment.
 
Classical liberals of today understand the separation as complete, as in “leave us (the citizens) alone” to pursue religion or not and in the manner we choose. The state should stay totally out of religious life.
 
As writer Collin Killick put it: “Laws that establish religion in government, even if created with the most benign intent, could put our nation on a path toward repressive theocracy” (emphasis added).
 
And “repressive” is how the state has been relating to science and business.
 
Former Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorf, though not fully calling for laissez-faire of science by the state, is calling for the decentralization of scientific research. Kulldorf challenges the domination of government string-pulling in science because the government, especially in public health as controlled by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dispenses most of the research money, deciding who gets it and which problem will be studied. Two-thirds of research money comes from federal, state, and local government sources, with well over half from the US government.
 
The gatekeeping, not to mention censorship, by the government on scientific research became apparent throughout our recent past two years of covid totalitarianism, as I have described the ordeal.
 
Kulldorf’s coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta, calls the science-controllers cartels: government agencies, journal editors, and peer reviewers, all of whom determine promotion, tenure, and research in academia.*
 
“Repressive scientism,” using F. A. Hayek’s term for a “pretense at science,” is what we seem to have been given. The disastrous effect of logical positivism on science today cannot be overstated. Quoting from the description of Hayek’s book, The Counter Revolution of Science, at Mises.org:

There was once such a thing as the human sciences of which economics was part. The goal was to discover and elucidate the exact laws that govern the interaction of people with the material world. It had its own methods and own recommendations.

Throughout the twentieth century, however,

the economy and people began to be regarded as a collective entity to be examined as if whole societies should be studied as we study planets or other non-volitional beings.

As molecules, in other words, or billiard balls and other inanimate objects. “Science had turned from being a friend of freedom into being employed as its enemy.” From a methodological individualism, where the individual entity or person was the unit of analysis, to a methodological collectivism—the group, or collective, as the unit.
 
The new, repressive method now applies to all sciences. And that is the collectivization and herd conformity (or groupthink) of science that we have today with the government in charge.
 
What we are left with is a narrow range of conventional research, sometimes flawed (or even fraudulent), and neglect or repression of creative thinking and disagreement with the establishment.
 
Decentralize all research to the university level, says Kulldorf. Let universities distribute the money and publish their own scientists’ findings through open (not blind) peer review. The process would speed up research and publication and perhaps lead to innovative findings.
 
The best solution, of course, would be to separate education completely from the state, but that would mean making universities businesses, which they are, as are churches. They just are not profit-making businesses, which they should be. (See Applying Principles, pp. 187-90.)
 
The fundamental issue is to completely separate business and state. Paraphrasing Killick, “Laws that regulate and control businesses could put our nation on a path toward repressive . . . fascism.”
 
Which is what fascism in its essence is. Socialism owns everything and everyone; fascism, a variant of socialism (perhaps we should call it the “Omicron” of socialism??) leaves some property private, but only in a nominal sense. It still controls everything and everyone at the governmental level.
 
It is the total, airtight control we have endured over the past two years.
 
 
* See my discussion of academic research, the peer review process, and its effects on science in Applying Principles, pp. 123-32, 140-42.

The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship

The continued expansion of bureaucratic management leads ultimately to totalitarian dictatorship.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, describes this termination point:

The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.*

In several previous posts I have used the following words to represent the generally acknowledged mindset of a bureaucrat (1, 2): “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.”

Rules, lists, and paperwork. This is bureaucracy.

As Ludwig von Mises has taught us, bureaucracy is not a large, hierarchically structured organization, whether of big government or big business. It is the government’s method of managing its affairs, which means it is the “peaceful” method of managing coercion. Laws of the land, a budget for each bureau, and regulatory rules dictate to citizens what they can and cannot do. Disobedience brings punishment. The method is top-down; the higher authority must be obeyed.**

Business management is bottom-up, deriving its legitimacy from customer satisfaction, the only means in a free market of earning profits. Policies, not rules, are guidelines informing everyone in the company, from president to stock clerk, how to function in order to achieve optimal customer satisfaction and therefore optimal profits.

If a large, hierarchically structured business today seems bureaucratic, in the sense of being inefficient and insensitive to customers, look for the government’s demands for compliance to laws and rules. Compliance means obedience to a higher power, which consequently deflects attention from customer needs and wants. This is what makes businesses in a mixed economy take on the “rules are rules” mentality.

So why the bureaucratic indifference to people? Paperwork is the only yardstick bureaucracy has to measure its “success.” Laws and rules are commands that compel citizens to obey, and citizens usually do obey to avoid punishment. Paperwork records the compliance—but it must be correct.

The objective yardstick of a business is its bottom line, profits, which means it is successfully meeting its customer’s needs and wants.

A bureaucratic society is a rule-bound society. Freedom and creativity are not valued. (Creativity, after all, means breaking rules.) The more bureaucratic the society, the more rule-bound it will become. The socialist state, therefore, is a society dominated almost entirely by laws and rules. The more laws and rules, the more total the regulation of human affairs, the less value it places on its citizens’ lives.

Total bureaucracy—the totalitarian socialist state—is dictatorship by excessive law. This describes Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as the USSR and many similar regimes in the twentieth century.

The list has to be correct because all paperwork has to be correct. William Shirer made this clear in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when he described gangs of German secretaries dutifully typing orders to send Jewish people to their deaths.

Even a few members of Kerensky’s provisional Russian government, who were discovered by illiterate Bolshevik revolutionaries during the 1917 October Revolution, were compelled to write their own arrest papers. The paperwork had to be correct!

In a bureaucratic society, thought is neither required nor appreciated, only compliance. Thus, paperwork has to be correct for the lower-ranked official to avoid punishment and for the higher to justify his or her actions, by reference to a law or rule.

Concern for the person behind a bureaucratic number is minimal or non-existent. Just ask students at state-run universities what it is like to be a number on a roster. (And the rosters do have to be correct!)

Message for advocates of a free society? The fewer laws and rules, the better. Indeed, a strong argument has been made that we could easily do without legislature-made, statutory law by replacing it with common law.

Central planning requires centralized law-making, that is, deliberative assemblies (legislatures) and regulatory agencies to write and pass thousands of pages of laws and rules, all of which are subject to ossification, officious manipulation, and arbitrary application. This gives us the nefarious rule by men under a pretext of rule by law.***

Common law is decentralized and requires conceptual thinking by each citizen and judge to resolve specific disputes with reference to principles. Justice evolves and improves on a case by case basis, as wealth and well-being do in the decentralized free market.

Conceptual thinking requires the discovery and understanding of universal principles that can be applied to many concrete instances. Common law, therefore, is general and guided by rights, such as the requirement to prove intent in criminal cases, but it is constrained by precedent and usually confined to specific parties. Change in common law occurs slowly and deliberately.

Legislature-made laws and rules, in contrast, aside from their flagrant violations of individual rights, are at the same time concrete and sweeping, such as a ban on smoking in all public places and within twenty feet of a building. And because legislature-made law is made, not discovered, change occurs quickly and frequently, thus leading to a continual increase of laws and rules—and paperwork.

Thinking in principles and independent judgment are prerequisites for building and sustaining a free society. When our minds are driven to focus on lists and paperwork that must be accurate, conceptual thinking becomes difficult, though not impossible. For many, however, in bureaucratic situations, morality—honesty, integrity, courage, dignity . . . and human decency—go out the window.

The list has to be correct.

For more on the relationship between bureaucracy, socialism, and dictatorship, see Mises’ 1944 book Bureaucracy. Here is his one-paragraph summary and conclusion (p. 125):

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

Bureaucracy is not a benign institution.


* Man’s Search for Meaning (pp. 52-53). In this work, Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, describes his experiences in the concentration camps and his struggles to survive.

** “Peaceful” is in scare quotes because any expansion of laws and rules beyond retaliatory force to protect individual rights, through administration of the police, military, and legal system, is a violation of rights and therefore becomes a declaration of war on citizens. The overt use of guns is not usually required in many bureaucratic systems, because of citizen compliance, but the guns nonetheless are there in the background.

*** “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime,” said Stalin’s chief of secret police. See this post (pp. 280-83) where I discuss similarities between criminal and bureaucratic personalities.

Cross posted at the Foundation for Economic Education. 

From the Stick Motivation Department, Part Two: Class Participation

In last month’s post I discussed the coercive parenting technique of assigning chores to children. The alleged lesson of such coercion is to teach children the value of work, though it likely teaches them to hate it.

Coercive teaching contributes a number of techniques to the stick motivation department. Let’s take a look at class participation.

For middle and high schoolers, and even college students, teachers feel obliged—and claim the unquestioned right—to coerce quiet members of the classroom to “come out of their shells” lest they fail to succeed in life or live up to their potential; grades based on class participation, by as much as fifty percent, I have heard, is the brass knuckle approach to teaching this lesson.

Five to ten percent, perhaps as extra credit, may have some instructional value. But fifty percent? These classes of twenty to forty students are not courses in public speaking.

And grades, after all, are the carrots and sticks by which teachers maintain control of their charges. I’m not the first to suggest that grades be dumped from the classroom entirely.

In the old days, the traditional (and coercive) recitation technique of class participation required students to summarize the content of their reading assignment, or, frequently, to recite something from memory. If not accomplished to the liking of the teacher, the kids would have their knuckles rapped with a ruler, or worse. In ancient Rome, they were beaten with a stick.

The modern version is a mixture of old-style recitation and analysis. The former, as the new schoolmarms are wont to say, should be kept to a minimum, because “we have all read the assignment.” Memorization, of course, is scorned as authoritarian and having no place in school. The latter, analysis, can include putting the reading material into different words, evaluation, and, too often, the spewing of undefended opinion.

According to ed school edubabble, such discussions will help teach students how to think. It usually degenerates quickly into BS sessions. And some of the more talkative students have mastered the technique of impressing teachers by their glibness; the quiet ones are then marked down.*

In recent years, some class participation teachers have discovered—and have experienced revelations when discovering—that their heavy-handed approach to getting those pesky and resistant-to-talking quiet kids to speak up in class may not be the best thing for them.

This has come about largely due to Susan Cain’s 2013 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and her subsequently established website Quiet Revolution.  (See my related posts here and here.)

Jessica Lahey is one such reformed class-participation tyrant. Writing in The Atlantic, she firmly defended her conviction that quiet kids must be forced to speak up. When she received an “avalanche of angry comments,” many of which, to put it mildly, declared her “uninformed,” she wrote a softened article on Cain’s website. Lahey acknowledges that she was influenced to alter her teaching by Cain’s book and other articles on the topic (See especially Schultz and Cain for examples of teaching quiet kids without putting them on the spot.)

The upshot of “class participation reform” is that introversion and shyness are not the same and that any behavior can be motivated by multiple causes, not just what the extroverted teacher assumes is operating in the quiet kid.

“Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating” (Cain, p. 12). A room filled with twenty to forty classmates can produce considerable overstimulation for an introvert. Extroverts prefer the stimulation.

And most extroverted teachers assume shyness and introversion are identical. They also do not recognize that quiet kids may be actively listening to the other talkers, waiting for the moment to speak up when they have formulated what they would like to say. They also might be taking notes, say, for a subsequently required paper. Or, something extroverted teachers usually do not want to hear or acknowledge, the student may not like the teacher or the class, or both.** Certainly, there are other motivations.

But just as not voting in an election is participation in the political process, so also is not speaking up in class a form of participation. Teachers need to respond to, and find techniques of, reaching all personality types sitting in their desks.

A “one size fits all” approach to teaching, such as the assumption that speaking up in class is good for everyone, invariably brings out the specter of stick motivation.



* I must point out one more time that John Dewey, the alleged father of progressive education—“alleged” because he gave the epithet to Francis W. Parker—lectured when he taught, expected excellent memorization from his students, and wrote a book in 1938 to repudiate many progressive techniques used in his name, such as the necessity of class discussion to teach students how to think. For Dewey, subject matter was fundamental, because it is the “working capital” of thought.

The premise of many teachers today, as one colleague said to me years ago, is that “we teachers talk too much as it is. We have to get the kids talking.” I took that to mean less work for the teacher, something that was explicitly stated by my grad school classmates as justification for group projects: one paper to grade instead of four or five.

** Yes, I know there are teachers who brag about how they don’t care whether or not students like them or their courses. But they should.

Fixed vs. Growth Mindsets

In 1964, Minnesota Vikings football defensive end, Jim Marshal, picked up a fumble and ran 66 yards the wrong way, into his own end zone, causing his team to suffer a safety, or loss of two points.

To many, a faux pas such as this could result in humiliating embarrassment and a devastating blow to self-esteem. Marshall, however, realized he had a choice: either sit in his misery or do something about it. In the second half of the game he caused a game-winning fumble that was picked up by his teammate and carried to the correct end zone for the score.

This incident in essence illustrates the difference between the two mental habits or, more technically, psycho-epistemologies, described in psychologist Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Filling the Swiss Cheese Holes

A major problem with our current one-size-fits-all education is the gaps that occur in learning. Thirty or forty kids are presented with material at one time. They may work on some problems or research one topic, but then the instructor moves on. Those who don’t get it fall behind. Even those who do get most of the material, move on with what Salman Khan calls Swiss-cheese-like holes in their learning.

Khan has the solution for filling the holes. It is a technological solution, as many before him have promoted, but this one may stick in certain subjects.

On Killing Creativity

To create something means to come up with something new, to rearrange existing objects or ideas and put them into a form that has not been done before. Everyone is creative because learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, values, and skills by rearranging what we already have in our minds and integrating that content with what we are acquiring. When we learn, we craft new concepts, principles, values, and skills.

How creative each of us is varies and the process can be, and often is, stunted and destroyed. Some cultures are known to be more creative than others. For example, the Japanese education system produces students who score higher on standardized tests than Americans, yet American students and American culture are said to be more creative. How has this come about?

Ken Robinson, in a 2006 TED talk and, later, in his book The Element argues admirably that creativity should be just as important an objective of education as literacy and that our current one-size-fits-all system destroys it. This is the progressive idea of focusing on and stimulating the individual’s interests and therefore the individual’s imagination and inventiveness. It is this progressive influence in education and, no doubt, the overall non-authoritarian atmosphere of American culture that has allowed Americans to be more creative.

Robinson, however, like the progressives, erroneously clings to the government as supplier of education and blames the rise of  “one-size-fits-all” on the so-called factory model. Yet, it is precisely the government and all forms of authoritarian control that arrest and prevent imaginative thinking.

Government bureaucracy, using government guns as its means of control, only knows one-size-fits-all. In education, that calls for a core curriculum and both types of grading: evaluation and age-sequencing. Catering to needs and wants is something governments cannot do, or do very well.

As discussed in last month’s post, any type of physical force, trauma, neglect, or emotional abuse, severely hampers the development of self-esteem and independence. Without high degrees of these traits, children and adults become fearful of risk-taking experimentation—that is, they fear making mistakes that might be disapproved of and vilified by those who have been forcing, traumatizing, neglecting, or emotionally abusing them.

It was progressive educator Maria Montessori who realized that choice was crucial in the development of self-esteem and independence Her method of education, as a result, allows a maximum of choice in a structured environment. Montessori children who move on to more traditional schooling are known for their confidence and creativity.

Freedom to choose, which means freedom to make mistakes without fear of criticism or denigration, is the key to encouraging original thinking. Dictating to children—whether by parents, teachers, coaches, tiger moms, or stage moms—what the children must think and do is nearly as stunting and destructive as hitting or beating them.

In organized youth sports, the fear of making mistakes and lack of creativity and imagination has been pointed out by former National Hockey League star Wayne Gretzky. Lamenting today’s excessive control and domination by adults, Gretzky finds the origin of hockey creativity on the adult-less pond of yesteryear. In the current environment, he says, if kids are sent to the ice to play a scrimmage, the first thing a child will ask is, “What position do you want me to play?” The pond, Gretzky’s point being, as was the sandlot in the earlier days of baseball, was what taught kids how to make their own decisions. Today, they must bow to the dictates of the adults in charge, lest they be criticized for going against a coach’s system. The quality of play becomes cautious and mediocre, and often not fun.

The killing of creativity can be subtle and performed by apparently well-meaning adults. The premise of demanding obedience to authority can be expressed quietly and without obviously abusive techniques. It stems from the denial of choice. A parent, teacher, or coach who criticizes a child’s mistake and singles the child out as an example to others is demanding obedience to authority. The message to children under such a leader’s watch is that cautiousness, not imagination and creativity, is the path to the adult’s approval.

The well-meaning adult thinks that such criticism is what teaching is all about. But allowing mistakes and, as Montessori demonstrated, saving the correction for another time when a new teaching moment arises, are what build the foundation of creativity: namely confidence, self-esteem, and independence.

All forms of demands for obedience to authority, whether physical or mental, blatant or subtle, must be rejected.

Educational Innovation from Outside the Establishment

Innovation from outside well-established orders is not unusual. Just think the work of college dropouts Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or, more generally, the rise of capitalism and the astounding accompanying increase in longevity and standard of living that we have enjoyed as a result.

Innovation from the government-run education bureaucracy is almost non-existent, despite much lip service to audio-visual aids in the 1950s and distance learning in the past decade. Charter schools have been a feeble attempt to encourage innovation from within but the vise of bureaucratic rules eventually checks their freedom.

In light of this, three educational innovations from outside the government-run system are well worth mentioning. Take first the growth of the for-profit higher education market.

Trashed vehemently and repeatedly by the academic establishment, the Kaplans, Capellas, and DeVrys of the country, among many others, cater to a unique market segment: older working adults often seeking a career change. The story of the for-profits is told unapologetically in Change.edu by Andrew Rosen, chairman and CEO of the Kaplan organization and himself a product of the old-line East Coast establishments, Duke and Yale Law.

The for-profits, Rosen points out, are the third of three disruptive innovations in the last 150 years. Land-grants, despised by the elite as “workingmen’s colleges,” were the first. Community colleges, despised as overgrown high schools, were the second. And now the for-profits are the third, despised for measuring their success by money and customer satisfaction rather than, as Rosen pointedly and with considerable data observes, by the number of new buildings constructed on the resort-like campuses of traditional nonprofit and state-run universities.

The hullabaloo over the high proportion of student loans and high tuition at for-profits? Caused by de facto government price fixing. Recent innovation? The start-up for-profit New Charter University (1, 2) is offering as many classes as a student can complete within one semester, all for $796 (or $199 a month), plus a try-for-free plan. Do I hear snarky indignation from the establishment?

The second innovation from outside government channels is the rise of many entrepreneurial and parent-funded private schools in the slums of India and Nigeria (1, 2). Up to sixty percent of the elementary schools in these areas are private, with as many as thirty-five percent of them unrecognized by the government’s statistics. The schools are run by sole proprietors and cost perhaps five or ten dollars a month or about twenty-five percent of a typical parent’s income. Parents prefer these “greedy, profit-making” schools because their quality is much better than that of the free ones run by the government.

Not an entirely a new phenomenon, Estelle James and Gail Benjamin (1, 2) in the 1980s and ‘90s demonstrated that private education, whether in less or highly developed economies, will arise spontaneously when the government system fails to meet the needs—in quantity, quality, and price—of the market. The recent discovery of these schools in India and Nigeria reminds me of the work and success of Chicago teacher Marva Collins who taught her “retarded” public-school rejects to quote Shakespeare.

The third innovation coming from outside the establishment is an idea remarkably similar to what I suggested in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (pp. 172-79): mass lectures followed up with individual (not two- or three-person) tutorials. Salman Khan posted several math videos on YouTube designed to help his cousin only to find that many people around the world were benefitting from his ten-minute, easily digestible chunks of Internet-based learning. Now he heads the Khan Academy with 3100 (and counting) brief educational videos ranging from K-12 math to science to finance and history. Schools—public and private—are using the videos to communicate the basic fund of knowledge, which students access and watch at home, while class time is used to troubleshoot and individualize the learning.

My idea was to make a free market in education economically viable. Salman Khan seems to have beaten me to the punch. Now if we can only get the government completely out of the way!

It will be interesting to see how long before the public-school bureaucracy corrupts the use of these videos. After all, are all those teachers really necessary now? Ah yes, I can see the Luddites warming up their sledgehammers.

My description of these three innovations, incidentally, in no way means that I think the intellectual or political climate is softening toward the idea of a free market in education. In the near or distant future, I still do not see the idea on the horizon.

Should Spanking Be a Felony?

In my previous post I argued that hitting a child or dog is neither nice nor necessary. Positive motivation and the desire and willingness to develop a warm relationship are what generate influence to channel behavior in appropriate ways. The implication about hitting a child is that it transgresses legal boundaries.*

Indeed, spanking would seem to violate child abuse laws and some judges have concurred (1, 2, 3). Current law says that any marks or bruising left as the result of physical contact constitutes abuse (1, 2, 3). In most states, however, the law exempts “reasonable disciplining,” though precisely what that means is not always clear. The trend is unmistakably in the direction of banning spanking.

Whether it leaves a mark or not, spanking is the initiation of the use of physical force. Its purpose is to cause pain and to command obedience to the will of the adult. Its consequence is usually humiliation. In light of modern theories of child psychology and child rearing, such adult behavior is unacceptable. Whether every spanking parent should immediately be arrested is an issue of the implementation of new law. A long and unquestioned historical context of using physical force as a teaching technique calls for education of the populace and gradual, not impulsive, execution of the new principle. Uninformed parents can be well-meaning when spanking their children. The complications of parental and child psychology call for a grace period.

Consider the young father of a toddler I observed a number of years ago. I was having my hair cut and the toddler was supposed to be obediently crawling into the barber chair across the way, but he was not cooperating. The father became exasperated and swatted the child on the behind. The boy cried and obediently sat in the chair. What struck me about this incident were the emotional expressions of the father: embarrassment, probably because his child in public view was not “minding” him, and guilt, probably for having had to resort to force. The father’s behavior was not mean-spirited or felonious. He just needed to learn better ways of relating to his son.

In contrast, our daughter’s first experience with a haircut was completely pleasureful. Before getting her near the barber’s chair, her talented hair stylist bounced her on his knee for a few minutes and said funny things to make her laugh. Her haircut was a pleasant success—no need for physical force. Bottom line: it’s all in the technique. Teaching method is everything. The hair stylist used the fun theory of behavioral influence.

The most significant emotion present in all spankings, including the young father’s behavior above, is anger. To be angry enough to inflict pain, one must feel that an injustice has been committed, which then is allegedly righted by the spanking. This is the absurdity of spanking. Has the child committed an injustice? Has he robbed a bank? No, he refused to sit quietly in a barber’s chair! When parental anger in the twenty-first century rises to the level of using an implement, such as a paddle, stick, belt, hairbrush, or wooden spoon, etc., the intent is mean-spirited and sometimes vicious. I do not sympathize with anyone who calls this “reasonable disciplining.”

Psychologies are complex, though, and parents have reportedly cried after using such implements on their children, saying they didn’t mean to or couldn’t help themselves. Is such behavior criminal? Some murderers have regretted their killings and said they couldn’t help themselves. What’s the difference between these two kinds of behavior? One has thousands of years of cultural tradition behind it saying that it is okay to hit children, the other has the same number of years of tradition saying that it is wrong to kill another human being. Saying that it is okay to spank because of our historical tradition is cultural relativism. Other cultures have equal numbers of years of tradition saying that it is okay to hit women and mutilate their genitals. Historical context is only relevant in putting the new law into practice.

Spanking should be a felony because behavior is controllable, and whether or not a mark or bruise is left on the body, physical force has been initiated by a big, powerful adult against a small, helpless child. The issue here is one of fairness to the young father with the toddler in the hair salon. Throwing him in the slammer or putting him on probation would not help him become a better dad. As always, the issue is one of education, of the adult.



*In spite of what animal rights advocates say, dogs are property and rights belong to the owner. Children are human beings and their rights derive from that nature as such.

Group Projects: The Bell Has Tolled

A recent New York Times article exposed group projects in business schools as the frauds they have always been. When four or five students are assigned to produce one paper, the outcome should be obvious: at most one-fourth or one-fifth of the learning results, as opposed to the one-hundred percent learning of one student producing the entire paper. Many in groups who defer to others to do the work learn less. This is all done in the name of the division of labor and a simulation of the real world workplace. When I was in graduate school, some fellow students who were currently teaching, or ready to begin teaching, bragged about how the group project reduced their work load: eight papers to grade, say, as opposed to forty.

The Times article exposes other sins of business schools besides group projects, such as students not reading the text (or in some cases not even buying it) or skipping class except for exams. But as usual all of these issues have extenuating circumstances that need to be elaborated. Most of my students work twenty, thirty, or forty hours a week to pay for their union card while at the same time carrying a full load of courses. Some bright students who know they will do well in business explicitly say that they don’t give a hoot about grades—nor do I. And I sometimes tell my students I wish I could give them all A’s for the course on the first day of class, then anyone who wants to come back for the rest of the term to learn would be welcome. The college degree as union card is precisely what it is. All else is pretense.*

The group project, of course, also has its extenuating circumstances that need to be elaborated. It’s not as collectivistic as it sounds. It falls within the theory of cooperative learning and some form of it was used at the Dewey Laboratory School in the late nineteenth century and has been used routinely in nearly all Montessori schools for over a hundred years. The formal theory blossomed after World War II. If structured as a teaching and learning interaction among the participants, everyone can benefit, especially the weaker students.

In a setting where grades are required, the group process must be well structured and highly controlled by the teacher. The comments I hear from my current and former students, and my own experience as a member of groups when I studied for my MBA degree, testify that structure and control by the teacher are nearly always absent. In one class when I was a student, the instructor spent time balancing his checkbook while the students “worked” in their groups. On another occasion, the same instructor went home leaving us by ourselves to continue working on our group projects. After he was comfortably home, we students assumed, the lights of New York City went out for the second time in history—the blackout of 1977 had hit the Big Apple. Is “fraud” too strong a word for this kind of professorial behavior?

The group project in no way simulates real business experience. Most significantly absent in business are the head pats and chastisements known as grades. Further, there exists a division of labor within the groups, or “teams,” as they are usually called, with clearly established authority and skill-levels. Five students in a college classroom who have never met before have none of that. They are thrown into the fire and expected without guidance to survive. Typically, everyone in the group gets the same grade. And teams in business? Often the high performers are rewarded with raises and promotions. No educational system can offer such benefits.

In Montessori schools there are no grades. Younger, less experienced children learn from the older, more experienced ones. They learn by observation and imitation, and from instruction. The older children learn by leading, by setting good examples and by teaching. The process, as business people would say, is “win-win.” There is no complaint about slackers in the group. Slower students may take longer to digest the material with faster students enjoying the process of helping them. An “A,” a “B,” or a “C” does not depend on anyone’s behavior. Learning, not jumping through a hoop to get a biscuit, is the aim of Montessori’s cooperative learning environment.

Group projects and group cooperative learning have their place in education. Just not in the bureaucratically credentialed and grade-driven schools we have today.



*See pp. 159ff. in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism for more on bureaucracy-based credentials.

The Primacy of Psychology

In a previous post, I argued that method is primary in education, not content. By method I meant teaching students how to think conceptually. In the process of learning how to think, content would follow. In the current post, I would like to broaden this theme to the primacy of psychology, to teaching the effective use one’s mind in controlling and guiding behavior.

The primacy of psychology means cultivating the development of the child’s independent, uniquely individual self, that is, cultivating the growth of a strong conviction of worthiness and efficacy sufficient to guide the child to acquire the knowledge, values, and skills necessary to live a happy life without making compromises to please others. As I often find myself telling my students, “That last sentence was a mouthful. Let’s break it down into a few digestible chunks.”

First, “worthiness and efficacy” refer to the child’s self-esteem. Not the watered-down superficial stuff that the government schools promote, such as awarding bumper stickers to children for being first in their class for attendance or getting all A’s. This is a comparative award that makes children feel superior to all the others, not loveable or competent. Feeling worthy means “I am loveable, capable of being loved.” It is a deep conviction that begins in the relationship with the children’s parents (and relatives) and continues to develop (or become thwarted) in their relationships with teachers. Positive experiences from such friendships promote worthiness, negative experiences degrade it.

The same is true for the development of efficacy, which is a sense of competence, of being able to do things in the world. Children need frequent senses of accomplishment, whether it be learning the multiplication tables or whittling the image of a dog on a piece of pine. What children accomplish does not matter as long as they keep feeling that sense of accomplishment. Worthiness and efficacy influence and reinforce each other. The feeling “I can’t do it” often leads to the feeling “I’m no good” and the “I’m no good” feeling often leads to and encourages the “I can’t do it.” Self-esteem is prerequisite for and concomitant to the acquisition of an education.

“Knowledge, values, and skills” are the content of education. Because life is action, all education in essence is the acquisition of skill. And skill is the application of knowledge and values whether it be the technique and importance of performing a good car wash, a good weld, a good sale, a good lecture, a good design, or a good moral decision. Everything we do in life is a behavior, driven by what we know and value in the performance of the task. The aim of education, then, is to ensure that we possess sufficient self-esteem to acquire the knowledge and values necessary to pursue our chosen tasks in life. Those tasks may not be reading English literature or solving quadratic equations. They are what the child wants to pursue, not what the teacher wants to teach. Demanding that children study certain subjects in order to be “well-rounded” or exhorting them to acquire “knowledge for its own sake” is a prescription for many to drop out. Control and choice in their own education is what children require for both their self-esteem and their future.*

Finally, “without making compromises to please others” refers to independence (1, 2). Because government-run schools demand the opposite, as do many parents and other adults, independence is the least understood and least taught of psychological skills. Some few children are naturals at standing up for themselves. Most need guidance in understanding that they do not have to go along with their peers or significant adults if they do not agree with what is being asked of them. High self-esteem and a strong sense of personal identity are required to be able to say that the emperor has no clothes. Independence—independent judgment and independent action—can be taught, but educators today have a long way to go before they begin to understand what is required to achieve this feat.


*As I discuss in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (pp. 56, 144-46), “well-roundedness” is probably a slap at egoism, because it is “selfish” to concentrate in only one area of interest, and acquiring “knowledge for its own sake” is a hobby of privileged elites.

Control and Choice in Education

In education there exists a continuum of how much control is exerted over students or, to put it another way, how much choice is given to them. The scale ranges from the total control and minimal choice of state-run traditional education to the considerable freedom to choose given to students of such alternative schools as Summerhill and Sudbury Valley. With their cleverly designed didactic materials and the choice of which materials to work on, Montessori schools probably fall somewhere in between.

Teachers in all schools vary according to how much control they will exert in the implementation of their school’s ideology and how much choice they will give the students. So even an American public school classroom can enjoy freedom of choice and a Montessori classroom can be tightly controlled. The question is, how much control and choice should there be in education?

One answer for the public school is given by psychiatrist William Glasser: 

We are pushing for drug-free schools. We need to push even harder for coercion-free and failure-free quality schools because it is the alienation caused by coercion and punishment that leads young people to turn seriously to drugs (Choice Theory, p. 255).

“Quality school” is Glasser’s term for a B or above mastery learning, failure-free environment for all students. Replacing coercive external control psychology (1, 2), says Glasser, with kind and attentive teacher-student relationships will enable students to develop success identities. Glasser’s approach includes getting rid of the rewards-and-punishment system of grading and punitive detention and principal’s office “solutions” to disruption. Students will then become motivated through the friendly relationships with their teachers to achieve educational goals.

Glasser demonstrates in detail how his coercion-free, failure-free approach to schooling was accomplished with so-called learning disabled students in a Cincinnati middle school (Choice Theory, pp. 259-69; also described here). Smothered with kindness and attention, one hundred forty-eight overaged, “left behind,” probably destined-for-jail middle school students transformed themselves and learned what was required to move on to high school. Removing structural control over the students, adjusting to their pace of learning, and giving them choice in their education led to this success. Removing coercion removed failure.

The ultimate in coercion-free, failure-free schooling is that of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, where nearly everything is optional—especially courses and class attendance—and the students are given wide control of the schools through the democratic process. The question remains, though, how much control and choice should be left to the students.* This question cannot be answered without understanding that the main structural control in education today is the state’s monopoly over schooling, achieved through compulsory attendance laws, expropriation of funds to pay for the system, and curricular and methodological dictates through the state’s regulatory power. The framework of education is that control and choice are denied to both parents and students.

In the absence of state involvement, that is, in a free market in education, the issue of control and choice becomes a little less clear. If by “control” one means a prescribed curriculum that all students must study, and the parents agree to send their children to such a school, then it is the parents’ legal right to do so. Psychologically, however, one can still argue that greater control and choice be given to the child. Adjusting to pace of learning and catering to interests are two of the most important methodological requirements of a good school. Responding to students as human beings by building Glasserian friendships helps them acquire the confidence to flourish.

Traditional public education denies the legitimacy of control and choice in the classroom and through its coercive bureaucratic framework makes both impossible to maintain for any length of time. It is this context of coercion that makes the likes of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley appealing and probably has contributed to their success. (Indeed, in 1969 or so, when I read the first Summerhill book, I longed to be a student there. I would have thrived.)

As parenting requires guiding in the process of becoming a mature adult, formal education also probably requires at least some guiding in the acquisition of knowledge, values, and skills to achieve independence. Learning to think conceptually, for example, is not automatic and may require direction from an adult. But does this learning have to take place on the adult’s schedule? In the Summerhill/Sudbury model the instructor waits until lessons are requested by the students. Guidance, yes, but not coercion. As responsible parents quickly discover, they cannot force anything into their child’s brain. Children must be won over by persuasion. So, too, with students in education.


*My question presupposes the principle of rights, namely that the students should not be given control or choice to harm others or their property.

Working in Business as Opposed to Being a Student

When I began working in business, shortly after receiving my bachelor's degree, I experienced a pleasant surprise: I immensely enjoyed what I was doing. Indeed, I felt that working in business was a lot more fun than being a student, so much so that it took nearly six-and-a-half years before I could summon the strength to go to graduate school. I have related this story to a number of people, but never had a good explanation or understanding why being an employee is so much more enjoyable than being a student.

The answer is not the money difference—being paid to do work as opposed to paying the school for an education. It is the feeling of importance. The work itself may not be top-level decision making, which in my case it was not, but every stroke of my pencil mattered. It made the difference in customer satisfaction and company earnings. Everyone in the company contributed to both. The sense of importance also came from the familial atmosphere I experienced with my co-workers and boss, an atmosphere I experienced in every business that I worked for but have not found in any of my academic jobs. Is there something fundamentally different about business and education?

Ask a group of students if they feel important in their school and you are likely to get a blank or incredulous “are you kidding?” stare (Glasser, p. 45).  Importance in school, they say, comes from their friends or their extracurricular activities (sports, music, theater, etc.). As a student they feel more like a number on a roster, not overly seen or respected as a person, but as just another piece of produce to be graded and sorted. This, of course, comes from the bureaucratic nature of government-run and -regulated education (1, 2, 3). Grading and sorting are among the main functions of bureaucracy. Students do not feel important because they are not treated the way customers are in privately-run businesses.* Students are not customers, but they should be.

How are customers treated in private businesses? The slogans “customers are number one” and “the customer is always right” gives an indication of the importance of customers to businesses and the importance customers should feel when patronizing most well-run businesses. But what businesses can we compare to education to see what an education customer in a free market might feel? There are today several (relatively) free markets in education. Private lessons, whether piano, personal training, or tutoring, are one. The customer is given the instructor’s full attention and is rarely graded or made to suffer rewards and punishments. Importance is built-in to this type of learning.

Team lessons, especially in sports, are another. While softball and basketball coaches do evaluate players for best position and first or second team, they usually do not employ rewards and punishments of the type that carry the weight of school grades. The players, as a result, have fun working as a team to beat the other teams. There are small private classes, sometimes held in an instructor’s living room or in a rented hotel room. Customers feel relaxed and important to the instructor because they are there just to learn and have fun in the process. They are not there to be graded or tested, the source of anxiety and decreased feelings of importance. Finally, there are large private classes—lectures—sometimes given in hotel ballrooms. No grades, no tests. The customers are there to learn and take away from the lecture what they want. They are important to the lecturer for the revenue he or she earns. They may not have personal contact and receive personal attention from the lecturer, but the atmosphere nevertheless is pleasant—far more pleasant than the impersonal grad-student run megasections many of us have endured in research universities.

Clearly, it is the critical, comparative grade-and-sort atmosphere of government-run education that eliminates almost any chance for the student (customer) to acquire a sense of importance. Throw in at the K-12 level the compulsory attendance laws and you have students, especially at the secondary level, who have the sense of being in jail.**

The bureaucratic nature of education also makes it difficult for faculty to enjoy the familial atmosphere I experienced in private businesses. As professors, we have to fill out the right forms (and get our hands slapped if we don’t) and comply with the myriad rules. Customer satisfaction and earnings are irrelevant, so there is no benchmark of performance or importance. Conflict frequently erupts with the lack of a common goal. With guaranteed lifetime employment, the “family” sometimes becomes enmeshed in what seems like a marriage “without the possibility of divorce.” The stakes in such a situation have become too small.



* I include private universities, including the for-profits, in the category of bureaucratic education, because they are regulated and therefore their culture is controlled and defined by the government.


** Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo, “It’s Tough to Tell a High School from a Prison,” Psychology Today, June 1975. Also, see John Holt, The Underachieving School.

Teaching versus Learning versus Doing

Much ink has been spilled for decades over the concepts of teaching, learning, and doing, producing such commonplaces as “learning by doing is the best way to learn” and “let’s focus on learning, not teaching.” A couple of clarifications, however, need to be made about both of these remarks.

Consider the first one. Learning and doing, epistemologically and psychologically, are two different mental processes. They never occur precisely at the same time. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, doing is application. Acquisition is generalization, application is deduction from the general to employ the deduction in a specific concrete situation. A child learns the generalization of balance, of shifting one’s weight, when riding a bicycle. The child applies that knowledge in practice to perfect the skill. Learning comes before doing, perhaps from a parent or older sibling who is teaching the concept of balance or through trial-and-error learning. Sometimes it might occur a split second before the doing but it still comes before.

Trial-and-error learning proceeds in this manner. Try one thing. It doesn’t work. Try something else. It doesn’t work. But there may be similarities in the two actions that did not work sufficient to make a primitive generalization. Deduction from the generalization then follows to try a new action. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than the previous failures. More trial, error, generalization, deduction, and further trial then ensue. Some learners are quick to pick up through observation what has to be done to execute a new skill; others are not. The point, however, is that ideas—no matter how primitive or unformed, or even how unaware the actor may be of the ideas—precede action. Add to this that ingrained mental and/or physical habits may have to be challenged and changed before the skill can be developed.

The significance of teaching before doing is to save the time that can be wasted when going through repeated efforts of trial and error. It also may prevent injury that can result from uninformed trial and error, such as, without instruction, learning to ride a bicycle or operate a complicated piece of machinery. “Learn-by-doing”—when understood to mean practice—is essential to perfecting a skill, mental or physical, but mental understanding, even of a mental skill like logical thinking, comes first.

This takes us to the comment about focusing on learning, not teaching. To teach, however, means to effect learning, to see to it that the students understand and can apply what has been taught. Even the standard definition of teaching—the transfer of knowledge from one person to another—indicates that teaching is not achieved until learning has been accomplished.

Some of the desire, no doubt, to emphasize learning over teaching comes from distrust of the lecture as a legitimate teaching method, but a well crafted lecture framed in essentials and delivered with conviction can effect a great deal of learning in its listeners. More generally, the comment most likely stems from the tired indifference to teaching and learning, not to mention overt rudeness, exhibited by many tenured teachers and professors. The state-run school and university systems do not cater to the needs and wants of their customers. Yet that is precisely what the focus on learning means.

In marketing—and teachers, as I have written before, are sales reps—a notion called the “marketing concept” says that everyone in the company, from the president to the stock boy, should not make any decision or take any action without first considering its effects on the customer. “We are no longer in the business of selling what we make,” General Electric said many years ago, “but making only what we can sell.” This means, quite simply, whether one is a writer, a teacher, or a sales rep: “know thy audience.” Know where the students are now in the learning process, then challenge them by stretching. But the stretching cannot go too far because that produces discouragement and it cannot be too elementary because that creates boredom. Finding the middle ground is what teaching to effect learning is all about. It is not an easy task. It requires constant observation of the students and adaptation to the their needs.

Focusing on learning is what every good teacher should routinely do. Teaching and learning are separate activities, performed by different people. The teacher teaches, the learner learns. But the teacher knows what and how to teach by first tuning into the learner. Anything else is whistling in the wind.

The Factory Model of Education, Technocracy, and the Free School Movement

The American free school movement of the 1960s and early ‘70s arose as a rebellion against the oppressive authoritarianism of state-run education, that is, the top-down, coercive, follow-the-rules and -rubrics mentality that dictates from on high what has to be done in the classroom. Various writers have referred to this authoritarian system, among other terms, as a technocracy and a “factory model” of education.

That is to say that business and capitalism usually take the blame for the authoritarianism. The last thing that free school advocates would propose is a free market in education. Yet there is much to be admired in the work of the founders of free schools: their emphasis, in particular, on decentralized organization and catering to the needs and interests of the child. Democratic management of the schools, which no doubt empowers the children, may or may not flourish in a free-market system.

The notion of free schools goes back at least to the work of a young Leo Tolstoy (1, 2), who disliked the rigidity and sterility of the European schools. The proponents of the idea, however, are mistaken about the role of business and capitalism in producing the authoritarian atmosphere they are rejecting. The factory model of education, for example, has a badly misunderstood history. Some say that the entire American public education system, dating from its beginnings in the 1840s, was modeled on the factory system.  Students, it is said, are products produced assembly-line style, then sold to the highest bidder in the labor market.*

The factory model, however, is an early twentieth-century phenomenon, coexistent with the rise of progressive education but not an essential characteristic of it. Labor productivity and efficiency were the focus of so-called scientific management (1, 2). These ideas—many of them needed at the time, as management of any kind was not well understood as a skill or taught—were transferred to the administration of public schools.

The problem was (and is) that public schools are bureaucratic, top-down, coercive institutions. Businesses are not. Businesses operating in a free market have a built-in measure of efficiency: profit earned through customer satisfaction. Bureaucracies measure their success by reference to the higher authorities in government who set the rules, laws, and budget. That is the source of the authoritarian atmosphere of public education. The factory model is bad analogy. The product of education is knowledge, values, and skills; the students are paying customers.

Technocracy was a movement in the 1930s that advocated using scientists and engineers to run government (and, therefore, the control and regulation of business). It gave us the phrase “social engineering.” The free school movement of the 1960s brought the term back to refer to the authoritarian nature of public education. This is not incorrect because technocracy is a species of bureaucracy and bureaucrats, whether expert scientists and engineers or not, call the shots over their subordinates. It is unfortunate that the free school advocates do not see the connection between technocracy or bureaucracy and governmental coercion. It is only the free market that would fully allow them to pursue their goals without further authoritarian influence from outside.

Indeed, John Holt did come to the conclusion that the only valid form of education safe from corrupting influences is home schooling, an autarchic withdrawal from the world at large. Holt never did advocate, nor would have advocated, capitalism. Other free schoolers think that their model of small, decentralized child-centered schools should become the model of public education, replacing the current authoritarian behemoths. They fail to see that any cooperation with the coercive apparatus of bureaucratic government requires compliance to rules and laws. Even charter schools that supposedly are freed from some of those rules still succumb to political football tossing and regulation. Many fail to maintain their original missions (1, 2).

The upshot of schooling is that schools are not factories that produce goods. They are high-traffic service firms analogous to entertainment businesses. Some entertainment companies, such as concert halls and sports stadiums, provide their services to thousands of people at one time. Others provide individual services, one customer at a time. There is no reason to assume that a free market in education would not provide its services on a similar scale. The methods of delivery would be the lecture and the tutorial. Customers would be free to choose which services, as described, in combination, or in other variations, they would like to buy. The market would decide. No authority would oversee, control, or regulate.



*I have heard college professors refer to their students as work in progress. When the students graduate, they are finished goods. A better description of environmental determinism—the molding of the child’s clay mind by an outside authority—could not be given. Hopefully, such professorial comments are bad metaphor, rather than serious descriptions.

“You Can Get It in the Book”

Many years ago, while being interviewed by a dean for an academic position, I became engaged in a discussion of the philosophy of education. The dean tossed out as if it were self-evident: “The lecture has been obsolete for 500 years, since the invention of the printing press. Students can read the book.” His assumption was that lectures were needed in the pre-printing press era when books were rare and expensive, but not today when they are plentiful.

While it is true that with careful reading and study one can “get it in the book,” this neglects differences between written and oral presentations, between reading and speaking. These differences give rise to the true benefit of the lecture and explain why it has not died out in 500 years.

The average rate of reading with comprehension by an adult is about 250-300 words per minute. The average speaking speed of politicians is 120-25 words per minute, and CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite spoke at the exact rate per minute of 124 words. Casual conversation is often faster, but the point about the lecture is that formal oral presentations are delivered at half the rate, or less, of the average reading speed.

This means that less information can be presented orally in one minute than what can be read in the same amount of time. Less information in an oral presentation means essentialization. A lecture that essentializes a text makes it easier for the listener to grasp the main points of the written content. With the main points in hand, the listener can then pursue a more detailed study of the written material without first having to read at length to separate the essential from the nonessential. The advantage of the lecture is its efficiency; it saves time.

Whether the speaker deliberately essentializes the presentation or not, the listener hears it as essentialized, as important. The detail in the text is understood as detail. This means that it matters what gets selected as essential in the oral presentation. It makes the difference between good, bad, and indifferent lectures.

The efficiency of the lecture, of course, can also be achieved in conversation with an expert or mentor. The real advantage of the lecture is its ability to broadcast large amounts of essentialized material to many listeners at one time. Does this mean that everyone in the audience learns and digests the material in exactly the same way, one hundred percent? Hardly.

The comprehension and learning of listeners to a lecturer is exactly analogous to the comprehension and appreciation of listeners to a string quartet concert. One member of the quartet’s audience might be tone deaf. The next might be a professional violinist from another group who frequently plays the same pieces as those being performed on stage. Similarly, some students in my classes come in with D-’s in their prerequisite courses. Others come in with A’s. Most are somewhere in between. Audience members—of lectures and string quartet concerts—take away from the experience what they want, and are able, to take away.

Fine tuning may or may not be desired. In education, it usually is, which is why Jacques Barzun declared, “A lecture is a sizing of the canvas in broad strokes. The fine brush
and palette knife must be used close up to finish the work of art” [1] and why Gilbert Highet argued that the only two methods of teaching are the lecture and tutorial [2].

The purpose and value of the lecture is mass communication. The purpose and value of the tutorial is personal communication and individual attention. Though some, perhaps many, of a lecturer’s audience may not absorb everything the lecturer intended, a few listeners may be motivated to study the subject in more detail, just as concertgoers may be stimulated to buy CD’s of the works performed and listen to them many times over in order to learn them thoroughly.

The lecture is part of the division of labor in education. The tutorial is the other part.


1. Teacher in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 39.
2. The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), chapter 3.

Education in One Lesson

Unjustly neglected, difficult-to-find, and significantly influential on my own work, The Real Academic Community and The Rational Alternative by Thomas L. Johnson is a kind of “education in one lesson.” Like Henry Hazlitt’s gem on economics, Johnson’s begins with the lesson and then illustrates it abundantly throughout the remaining chapters.

The lesson? That schools today (and since antiquity) are institutions not of learning, but of authoritarianism. Force and fear reign supreme. Administrators and instructors “are the authority figures who must be obeyed in every respect, and students, who are the ‘peasants’ in this establishment, must try in every way to please those who rule over them.” In short, students “must please the schools, colleges or universities, instead of these institutions having to please the students.” The power of the book is in its illustrations of the lesson and in the free-market alternative that Johnson proposes.

From the primary and secondary school level:

Discipline. The authoritarian setting, says Johnson, works against the possibility of order in the classroom. Students are forced to be there by law, directly in the lower grades and indirectly in the higher, by the hampering of a free market through regulation. As a result, “almost everything in the classroom is done by means of orders and threats.” The students are ordered to perform certain tasks and threatened with low or failing grades if they don’t comply. Cornered rats—and prisoners—rebel when squeezed too hard. Schools are scholastic prisons and teachers are the guards and wardens paid to keep order.

Drugs. In the authoritarian climate of today’s schools, where the “customers” are not permitted to pursue their own interests, boredom, resentment, confusion, and low self-esteem frequently result. Drugs are seen by some students as a way to relieve their feelings of hopelessness.

Violence. “Force is the hallmark of any authoritarian establishment whether this be a state or an institution. And wherever there is force there will always be acts of violence. They are inevitable companions.”

Cheating. Anyone who has been through today’s school system knows that knowledge is not what is being marketed. “Students, recognizing that good grades and a diploma are what is really valuable to them, will often not hesitate to cheat in order to obtain these primary ‘goods’ which the teachers and schools are really selling.”

At the college level, Johnson has this to say:

Degrees. “It is because institutions of learning give out diplomas or grant degrees that they operate in an authoritarian manner. It is because the students must please the teachers and professors, as well as the institutions, in their attempt to ‘win’ the certificates of graduation that allows the schools, colleges and universities to be the dictatorial institutions that they are. . . . The professor orders the students to perform certain tasks—read certain assignments, write specific papers or reports, give designated oral presentations, etc.—and the students either follow these orders, or else.” Professors hold the degree up for ransom and their red ink pens are their guns.

Student Government. Why does it exist? Because students “realized that matters were often in need of change at the college or university and so they decided to band together in the attempt to see what they could do to bring about the desired changes.” In a free market, dissatisfied customers can stimulate change in a supplying business rather quickly, or else a new one will soon be on the scene to meet the needs of the dissatisfied buyers. But schools are not free enterprises. “All student government could really do was to petition, that is to beg, the administration or Board for favors—like changes in rigid social rules—that would make life at a bit more bearable.”

Academic Freedom and Tenure. Similar to the plight of students in an authoritarian climate, professors organized to protect themselves against administrations. They demanded and got the privilege of lifetime employment and the license to say and write whatever they please (as long as it is consistent with state or administration dogma). In a free market, employees who disagree with their employers simply leave and go elsewhere, and perhaps start their own businesses. Education, however, is not a business; there is nowhere for the professors to go.

Titles and Robes. Johnson discusses other issues, such as honor systems, academic and social probation, dress codes, hazing, and school spirit. His crowning achievement, however, is his comment on titles and robes.

“But what do titles signify?” asks Johnson, titles such as “Doctor” and “Dean.” He answers:

Titles signify power, prestige and authority, and they have always been used to instill fear in others—to con others into thinking that the titled personage is someone special and better than others who must be looked up to and obeyed. . . . Titles . . . are almost always found where there is some degree of tyranny.

How about academic regalia—

all those Medieval robes, caps and hoods? . . . It is true that certain businesses do have their employees dressed in similar outfits, or many businesses have a particular character, like a clown, dressed in a certain way and acting as a representative or symbol of the business. But one does not find, as one does in the academic community, a group of academic “clowns”—the professors, administrators, and board members—dressed in Medieval clerical garb forming and marching in academic processions that look almost identical to religious processions. . . .


Titles and robes are always found wherever one group of people is trying to lord it over another group of people. Kings and dictators get themselves up in fancy costumes and demand that they be called by an array of titles. Military and academic personnel do the same. But not businessmen. They do not, and cannot, lord it over customers. They must win the favor of customers by demonstrating their talent and ability. Talents and robes are of no help in a rational and healthy business environment.

The rational alternative to this forceful, fearful authoritarianism is a free market of educational businesses—”private, profit-making and openly competing enterprises that are only selling instruction, not grades and degrees. . . . There would be no entrance requirements and no prerequisites. . . . There would be no grades and no diplomas or certificates.” The customers would evaluate the sellers much as is done in free-market businesses today. Teachers, the peddlers of knowledge and ideas, would not evaluate the customers.

Education and the Rent Control Model of Monopoly

Education in the United States today is a monopoly, as is the supply of rental apartments in many cities. Monopoly[1] is the restriction of a portion of a market for the exclusive use of certain select sellers at the expense of other sellers who are forbidden entrance into these markets. It is a government-granted privilege.

The delivery of first class mail is the most obvious privilege granted to the US Postal Service. When teenage entrepreneurs have attempted to compete with the post office, they have been ruthlessly put out of business by the feds. But monopoly does not have to be a single seller. It can be a monopoly of the many, as occurs in occupational licensing where the goal is to restrict supply in order to increase prices and therefore income for those who are granted the license.

In government-run monopolies, such as education, the goal is to keep price low and the supply widely available. Inefficiencies that result from the top-down, non-market focus of bureaucratic management in turn lead to high costs that are subsidized by the government. The effect is to freeze out private-sector competition—if it is legal in the first place to compete with the government-run schools. In some countries it is not. If a private-sector system of schools is allowed to exist, the costs of private education often require a quite high price.[2] This is what we have today in the United States and it is analogous to the rent control markets in such cities as New York and Berkeley and Santa Monica, California. The only difference is that the controlled apartment buildings are privately owned. City housing removes the need to call the comparison analogous.

The privilege granted to the operators of government-run schools consists of far more than the obvious lack of competition. It creates a guild of teachers and administrators who work primarily for the benefit of their own needs and wants, not those of their students. As Adam Smith[3] put it over two hundred years ago, referring to publicly financed higher education:

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

And:

The discipline of the colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefits of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students, in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability.

In the privileged comfort of tenure and salary guarantees, most of today’s K-12 and college teachers seldom, if ever, have to face real competition. Opposite the intended goal of a widely available supply, bureaucratic inefficiencies and indifference create large class sizes and shortages of instructors such that students bang down the teachers’ doors begging to get into the classes that are scheduled—not because the students want to learn from the great masters, but because they need the units. Government involvement in education creates a situation in which sellers do not have to do anything to attract customers. Some sellers—the teachers—find the door banging annoying and the students a nuisance. Niceness, cordiality, and, generally, concern for the customers’ needs and wants, as a result, often go out the window. The same is true of rent-controlled apartment house superintendents.

The solution to both education and rental housing is decontrol and privatization. The privatization of the education market and the decontrol and privatization of the rental apartment market would at once increase the supply and variety of schools and rental apartments, because anyone would be free to begin offering these services and would be free to do so at a profit. The disparity between the current private and public sector prices would converge, because the abnormally high prices of the private sector would immediately drop due to the immediately increased supply (or promise of such increase).

In a free market real prices decline over time. As efficiencies and innovations emerge in the newly deregulated education and rental apartment markets, prices—in terms of the number of labor hours required to purchase a unit of the service—would also decline. Customer satisfaction would become the means to earning a profit. Niceness, cordiality, and catering to the needs and wants of the customer, not airs of guild-like smugness and superiority or indifference, would become primary.


1. Chapter 10
2. See “Dozens More Colleges Pass the $50,000 Mark This Year,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009.
3. Book V, chapter  I, part III, article II

The Primacy of Method

The progressive education goal of teaching students how to think, as opposed to teaching them a particular content, does not mean that content is omitted or ranked third, fourth, or fifth in the hierarchy. It does not even mean that content is ranked second, for as John Dewey put it in one of his occasional business metaphors, subject matter is the working capital of thought. Taken literally, a business is not viable if it does not have working capital. In Dewey’s usage, the metaphor means: no subject matter, no thought.

If learning how to think conceptually—in principles and without a dichotomy between abstractions and concretes—is correctly taught, content must be included to have something to think conceptually about. The key point about primacy of method is that the content does not have to be any particular content or “core curriculum.” This is in contrast to traditional education that puts curriculum first.

This is also not to say that teaching how to think is not a subject matter in its own right. It is. The principles of logical thinking, generalization, application, and the creative process are content that can and should be taught throughout secondary and higher education. The problem is that the progressive movement of the twentieth century never rigorously taught the principles of thinking. In its place it put poorly designed and controlled group projects, a barrage of failed reforms, and often little if any well-organized content.

Nevertheless, the primacy of method, or teaching students how to think well, is the essential distinguishing characteristic of progressive education when it is compared to the traditional or conservative form. Indeed, the aim of the great education reformers in history, beginning with Quintilian and even including the Jesuits, was, as formulated by Rousseau, to see the child as a child, not as a smaller version of the adult. This means in particular to see the child’s mind as a child’s mind, hence the need for specialized techniques to develop young thought processes. It includes being nice to the child and catering to the child’s interests.

“Being nice” can be viewed as symbolic of the progressive emphasis on the “whole child.” The two phrases, however, mean a lot more than the clichéd versions sound. They emphasize, in addition to not physically or mentally punishing the child, the need to be aware of the child’s psychology and to encourage the adoption of life-advancing self-confident premises. The extended meaning of “whole child” is the development of an unobstructed mental and emotional life that produces independent, not just sound, judgment. Content must be there in the child’s brain, but stuffing it or furnishing the “empty vessel” with a prescribed core curriculum is not the primary goal of education. Teaching students sensible decision making (sound judgment) and the ability to perceive facts as facts and, more importantly, especially in the face of opposition, the willingness to act on those facts (independent judgment) is. Content follows, driven by parent and student, not bureaucratic, interest.

When parents and students are allowed to determine content by buying and abstaining from buying the services of entrepreneurial teachers who are unhampered by the dictates of educational bureaucrats, a system of progressive education can be fully achieved. It is for this reason that I would describe the theory of concentrated attention and independent judgment detailed in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism as a theory of progressive education without the state. Interference of the state in education—by forcibly dictating what will be learned and how it will be learned, by forcibly expropriating funds from some to pay for the education of others, and by forcibly compelling children to attend school at all—thwarts and destroys the aim of catering to the needs and interests of the child. Only a free market in education that bans the initiation of physical force against parents, students, and entrepreneurs would make it possible for this aim to be accomplished.

Primacy of method means that education is aimed at the development of the mind. A mind well trained in the functions that are its distinctive nature, namely the correct perception and evaluation of the facts of reality and the guidance of behavior based on those correct perceptions and evaluations, is a mind that has been trained in method. It is one that has been taught how to think. Content is acquired and accumulated in the process but it is not primary.