Information about Compulsory Education

Compulsory education is education which children are required by law to receive and governments to provide. The compulsiveness is an aspect of public education. Homeschooling is typically an alternative to going to government-accredited public schools.

Compulsory education at the primary level was affirmed as a human right in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many of the world's countries now have compulsory education through at least the primary stage, often extending to the secondary education.

Plato's Republic popularized the concept of compulsory education in Western intellectual thought.

The Aztecs had an early compulsory educational system, with their requirement that all male children were required to attend school until the age of 16.^[1]

The Education Act of 1496 in Scotland obliged the children of noblemen and freeholders to attend school.

In 1774 mandatory schooling was introduced in Austria from which it gradually spread to other countries in the 19th century. It reached the American state of Massachusetts in 1852, and quickly spread to other US states thereafter. Mississippi was the last state to effect a compulsory schooling attendance law in 1918. To this day, all 50 states have maintained compulsory schooling attendance laws. [1]

Criticism

As the Declaration of Human Rights attests, compulsory education is widely approved. However, it has had its critics. Economists and libertarians have argued that compulsory education takes up a great deal of an individual child's time and is imposed on them without their consent or in regards to their own interests.

Educators have also criticized compulsory education. Paul Goodman's Compulsory Miseducation (1962) ^[2] elaborated themes from his earlier Growing Up Absurd (1960) ^[3] and was the first modern statement what, in the following decade, came to be called the "deschooling movement."

Ivan Illich is perhaps the most well known person in this movement. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for the disestablishment of schools. He thought that schooling confuses teaching with learning, grades with education, diplomas with competence, attendance with attainment, and especially process with substance. He thought that schools did not reward real achievement, only processes. Schools inhibited a person’s will and ability to self-learn, ultimately resulting in psychological impotence. He claimed that forced schooling perverted the victims’ natural inclination to grow and learn and replaces it with the demand for instruction. Further, the current model of schooling, replete with credentials, betrays the value of a self-taught individual. What’s more, institutionalized schooling seeks to quantify the unquantifiable – human growth. For Illich, creative, exploratory learning requires an individual’s own initiative to truly impact the learner positively. He called for learning networks that would allow people with similar interests to communicate and explore problems together. The internet makes his dream imminently realizable (Illich, 1970).

John Caldwell Holt, perhaps directly behind Illich as the most famous name of anti-schooling literature, thinks that people, even youths, should have the right to control and direct their own learning, and that the current compulsory schooling system violates a basic fundamental right of humans: the right to decide what enters our minds. He thinks that freedom of learning is part of freedom of thought, even more fundamental of a human right than freedom of speech. He states that forced schooling, regardless of whether the student is learning anything whatsoever, or if the student could more effectively learn elsewhere in different ways, is a gross violation of civil liberties (Holt, 1974).

Dennis O’Keeffe said that we require all families to send their children to school on the ground that some families do not understand the importance of equipping their children with elementary cognitive and moral training. O’Keeffe thinks that it is not logical to force people to school, when most would do this voluntarily, simply because a minority would not comply. O’Keeffe thinks that there is no correlation between time spent schooling and commendable moral character. He states that in Britain, the large expansion in secondary education correlates with a rise in juvenile crime, and he further points out that there is a marked increase in anti-social activity paralleling the expansion of mass schooling. Compulsory education laws cause learning in school classes to be weakened, sometimes severely, for those well disposed for it by those who are not (O’Keeffe, 2004).

Edwin G. West states that, with education, compulsion makes obligatory what most would do anyway. Some advocates of which lead to increased taxes or rates in order to provide children’s food, ‘free’ at local authority kitchens or shops. (West, 1974).

Murray G. Rothbard cites Albert Jay Nock as denouncing the educational system for making the uneducable children into the schools because of a flawed and vain belief that all children are equally educable. Because of this, the lives of those not suited for school is distorted and those who are educable do not get the most out of their education because the experience is wrecked by the others who are resistant to the institution. This claim is backed up in The Coleman Report: “… it appears that a pupil’s achievement is strongly related to the educational background and aspirations of the other students in the school” (Coleman et. al, 1966). Rothbard states that the history of the drive for compulsory schooling is not guided by altruism but by a desire to coerce the population into a mold desired by the Establishment. He thinks that people like Horace Mann, Henry Barnard and Calvin Stowe pushed so mightily for the formation of free and compulsory schools because they were needed to indoctrinate immigrants and protect against mobocracy, brought about in part as a reaction to the Jacksonian movement.

In 1925 the Supreme Court declared, “The child is not the mere creature of the State.” (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510) Yet this has largely been ignored, allegedly for the sake of the children, despite being in violation of the principles of personal liberty that this country was founded on. No matter what the face of compulsory education, there will always be a substantial number of parents and children that are deprived of the education that they desire, and the more that education becomes public, the more there will be parents and students deprived of the education they feel they need. Further, the more uniform the educational system, the more the needs and desires of individuals and minorities will be stamped out. Rothbard quotes Herbert Read: “Mankind is naturally differentiated into many types, and to press all these types into the same mold must inevitably lead to distortions and repressions.” Rothbard also cites Herbert Spencer, who questioned a government’s ability to determine what constitutes a good citizen and how best to produce them (Rothbard, 1978).

Rothbard goes on to quote Isabel Paterson: "...every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the ‘will of the people’ in ‘democracy.’ Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state." (Ibid).

Abolishing public schools, claims Rothbard, and with it the property tax linkage, would drastically help to end the zoning restrictions that allows suburbs all over the country to evolve into upper middle-class (nearly always white) preserves. Rothbard states that the abolition of public schools would dismantle the property tax burden and would allow for other forms of education to surface that could better satisfy the diverse needs of a varied population (Ibid).

The existence of the public school means that childless people are forced to subsidize families with children. Poor, single, parentless people are forced to subsidize wealthy families with children. There is no ethical logic in this. Rothbard goes on to point out that a right to free speech does not mean that authorities have the right to force people to use their right to free speech. Somehow, the “right to an education” has been misconstrued into the obligation of authorities to force people to utilize that right. Rothbard also backs up O’Keeffe’s claim that there is “considerable evidence linking compulsory attendance laws with the growing problem of juvenile delinquency, particularly in frustrated older children” (Ibid).

Robert Epstein, in addition to reiterating the above-stated absurdity of spending so much money to try to teach people not ready to learn, points out that the current educational system provides no incentives for students to master material at a rapid pace, and leaves few to no options for those who do drop out because the system, for whatever reason, is not right for them. Compellingly, he also points out a Harvard study conducted in the 1980s that demonstrates that teenage turmoil appears in society within a few years of those societies adopting Western school practices and being exposed to Western media. Epstein also thinks that modern schooling and restrictions on exploitation of youth labor are anachronisms of the Industrial Revolution, and no longer appropriate for today’s world (Epstein, 2007).

Another dominant voice of the past few years calling for the abolition of the compulsory, universal public school system is that of John Taylor Gatto. He thinks that the real purpose of schooling is to produce an easily manageable, obedient workforce to serve employers in a mass production economy. Real education is not the intent, as a very well educated populace would be more difficult to control.

Gatto’s landmark, semi-formal and extremely thorough analysis of the educational system of the United States, The Underground History of American Education, attempts to identify many of the key individuals, organizations, events and crises (both happenstance and manufactured) that forged our educational system into its current form. He thinks that modern compulsion schooling suppresses free will, serves to maintain the sociopolitical order and keeps real power in the hands of a small elite caste. In the words of Gatto:

"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

Gatto recommends that schools be non-compulsory, that they should never exceed a few hundred in size (and even that is too large for his liking) and that the sea of administrators be abolished (he points out that in 1991, New York City had more administrators than all the nations of Europe combined). He thinks standardized tests are a useless indicator of ability, wishing students to be assessed strictly on performance. He wants district school boards to be abolished in the process of decentralizing schooling, allowing local citizen management boards. He wants to see children engaged in real tasks with meaningful benefits of the work they do, and he would like them to have choice in what they do. He wants tax credits, vouchers, and other methods employed to encourage a diverse mix of “school logics” to take hold, for he thinks that there is no one right way to teach a person, and that cramming everyone into the same mold is asinine. He wants subjects abolished, and thinks schooling needs to be largely arranged around themes, claiming that interdisciplinary work is more reflective of real world problem solving. Gatto also calls for the abolishment of teacher certification requirements, so that anyone can teach who wants to. With compulsion and certification gone, anyone who has something valuable to teach and is able to will have the chance, while those who aren’t effective teachers won’t attract students (Gatto, 2003).

References

Coleman, J. S., et al. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Epstein, R. (2007). Let’s abolish high school. Education Week. Retrieved April 18, 2007, from www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html

Gatto, J. T. (2003). The Underground History of American Education. New York: The Oxford Village Press.

Holt, J. (1974). Escape from childhood. In Noll, J.W. (Ed.), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues (pp. 25-29). Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill.

Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.

O’Keeffe, D. (2004). Libertarian Alliance. Compulsory education: An oxymoron of modernity. Retrieved April 16, 2007, from [2]

Rothbard, M. (1978). Public and compulsory schooling. In For a New Liberty (chap. 7). Retrieved April 12, 2007, from [3]

West, E. G. (1974). The economics of compulsion. In The Twelve-Year Sentence. Retrieved April 11, 2007, from [4]

Extent

In Canada, compulsory education is set for ages six through sixteen (18 in Ontario and New Brunswick). In Finland, it starts at the age of seven (± 1 negotiable), and ends after graduation from comprehensive school at the age of fifteen or sixteen, or at last after ten school years. In the United States, the ages for compulsory education vary by state, by usually start between the ages of five and eight and end at the ages of seventeen to eighteen ^[4] In Scotland compulsory education begins between four and a half and five and a half; it extends until the around the age of sixteen.

See also

• Public education
• Public school
• Child Labor
• Homeschooling
• Unschooling
• List of education articles by country
• Raising Of School Leaving Age (in the United Kingdom)
• Workforce
• John Taylor Gatto
• HSLDA

References

External links

• Rohit Bhat writes abut the hurdles that India will face before it can guarantee free education
• The Principle and Practice of Compulsion in Education
• Age range for compulsory education for UNESCO member states (UNESCO Institute for Statistics)
• A discussion of compulsory education as a human right (Right to education Project)
• From enforced schooling to self-directed learning A survey and a critique on compulsory education

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