The Libertarian Conspiracy to Destroy Public Education

Occasionally I’ll use phrases like “conspiracy to destroy public education” in these pages, and you, faithful reader, may reasonably wonder whether I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. I wish I were. But no, there really are people out there who simply want to dismantle the entire enterprise, despite evidence of public education’s benefits so obvious that David Brooks wrote a whole column about them this morning. People like Neil McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute’s “Center for Educational Freedom,” who recently published a new policy brief explaining why public education is intrinsically un-American. Again, that’s not bloggerly snark, it’s the actual thesis: McCluskey believes that public education is a “fundamentally flawed–and un-American–institution” and a later subhead describes “Public Schooling’s Un-American Ideals.” Basically he argues that we had a perfectly swell free-market system of private schools in the first half of the 19th century which gave a great education to the small fraction of people who were legally allowed to vote, own property, etc., until that proto-communist bastard Horace Mann came along and ruined everything. Because, as we all know, American-ness is wholly a function of the political and social arrangements that prevailed in the years immediately following the founding of the Republic and any deviation from such clearly represents a grave national threat to be destroyed at all costs.