Vin Suprynowicz

Defenders of the government compulsion schools were out in force over the holidays.

“Dear Vin,” writes one earnest parent, “I dropped my ‘terrified’ six-year-old off today at Xxx Elementary government-funded School. Wait. Was she terrified? No; She hugged her first grade teacher Mrs. Y. When we went to the book fair at the school gym two weeks ago, she hugged her four or five times and told her she loved her.

“Mrs. Y? What a do-nothing government bureaucrat. She is there two mornings a week before 8 a.m. to help tutor Annabelle with her reading. And when I picked Annabelle up Wednesday at almost 6 p.m. from the Kid’s Club county government funded ($4 a day) after school program, Mrs. Y still was in the classroom helping a child. …

Xxx, like all schools in Zzz County, met No Child Left Behind standards. Every month Mrs. Y and another first-grade teacher hold parents night to show parents how better to help their children read.

“Now as much as I think Mrs. Y and the educational system want Annabelle to learn far too much too soon and far more than I did at 6, I also think we are getting a deal paying her approximate $45,000 a year government salary. Why would I want to end this government school? Is a private school going to do anything more for Annabelle?”

A sincere and loving parent, clearly. I replied:

I regret to learn you’ve decided to commit your child to the indoctrination of a collectivist government monopoly, funded with moneys looted from me and others against our will.

Of course they employ many cheerful and well-intentioned people who enjoy working with children. Of course they start out teaching common and useful things. That’s why they’ve been getting away with this for so long.

(Though if you do any of the reading I’ve recommended — start with John Taylor Gatto’s “Dumbing Us Down” — you’ll find the rejection of teaching reading through phonics, a nutty idea unless it’s your goal to stretch 6 weeks of reading instruction till it lasts a stultifying three to five years, dates back more than 160 years, to Horace Mann himself. Given how easy it is, I’m a little surprised you and the other parents there need professional help figuring out how to teach your kids to read. Is it something in the water?)

I also suspect you vastly underestimate Mrs. Y’s compensation. If the poor dear won’t have to live on and pay her health care costs out of her savings when she retires — given her hefty tax-paid pension and health benefits — can you really compare her nine-month $45,000 to that of the 250-day-a-year private-sector taxpayer who funds her salary and all her benefits, and then must save for his own retirement and medical insurance out of what’s left?

Meantime, now that you and Mrs. Y are teaching Annabelle what wonderful things can be accomplished with funds looted from others against their will — and that the government can best determine what she should learn — do you really think those lessons will have no long-term impact?

Have you ever heard the story of the guy who started dumping free corn in the field for the wild pigs, after driving just a single fencepost into the ground? Every day he went out and drove another fencepost into the ground, laying a few cross-beams between the posts. Every day the pigs waited for him to walk off a piece, and then came around for the free food, having learned they could walk away again whenever they pleased.

“How absurd were your warnings about accepting the free corn!” they said, ridiculing the lone holdout pig who stayed lurking at the edge of the woods as they glutted themselves. “Nothing bad has ever happened! We LOVE the corn man, and he loves US. You should come give him a big hug!”

Finally the day came when the pen was finished. The pigs walked in, just as they had become accustomed to doing. And the man closed the gate.

I’m glad you appreciate all the free stuff you’re getting at the expense of all those who would find their furniture set out on the sidewalk if they declined to “volunteer” their school taxes. I sincerely hope you don’t wake up some day to wonder why Annabelle is helping them load you in the trucks.

At the very least, you might want to visit one of our local high schools, watch the kids with the spiked hair and the body piercings go through the metal detectors and hunker down to sneer “I’m never gonna read another book as long as I live once I get outta this dump,” and ask yourself how on earth these institutions manage to produce such an end product from such promising raw materials as our bright, lovely, enthusiastic Annabelles.

It’s not as though we weren’t warned. I recently came upon an old copy of Rose Wilder Lane’s “The Discovery of Freedom / Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” a book of only 262 pages.

A joyful clarion call to freedom, a seminal work of modern libertarian philosophy, “The Discovery of Freedom” analyzes the struggle for freedom from ancient times, concluding “Americans are the richest people on earth, not because an exchange of useful goods is hindered at the frontiers, but because Americans are better able to use their natural freedom than any other people on earth.”

Way back in the distant mists of 1943, Ms. Lane was explaining: “Forty years ago, American children went to school because they wanted to go, or because their parents sent them. Children knew the fact that schooling is a great opportunity which the Revolution had opened here to all children alike.”

But “The American method of education was never fully developed; it was stopped about forty years ago, by the eager German-minded reformers, who believed that the State can spend an American’s money for his, or his children’s education, much more wisely than he can.

“American schooling is now compulsory, enforced by the police and controlled by the State (that is, by the politicians in office) and paid for by compulsory taxes,” Ms. Lane explains. “The inevitable result is to postpone a child’s growing-up. … His actual situation does not require him to develop self-reliance, self-discipline and responsibility; that is, he has no actual experience of freedom in his youth.

“This is ideal education for the German State, whose subjects are not expected ever to know freedom,” Rose Wilder Lane points out, “But it does not work that way in this country. …”

Trying — and failing — to disguise the underlying compulsory nature of their undertaking, “The teachers try to make learning easy, a game,” Ms. Wilder pointed out. “But real learning is not easy; it requires self-discipline and hard work. The attempt to make learning effortless actually keeps a child from discovering the pleasure of self-discipline and of the mental effort that overcomes difficulties. . … It is not the best preparation for inheriting the leadership of the World Revolution for freedom.”

Rose Wilder Lane warned us, 65 years ago. John Taylor Gatto — New York City and New York state (government) teacher of the year — quit in disgust in 1991 and has devoted the rest of his career to tracing the history and bad effects of compulsion schooling.

No one believes them. They watch our kids doped up on Luvox and Ritalin to keep them docile in their seats, our fine expensive schools reduced to madhouses where teachers are refused the power to discipline or expel the depraved, where the inmates occasionally march in with stolen guns to mow down everyone in sight — and they merely tell us “Annabelle hugged her first grade teacher and told her she loved her.”

I liked my first grade teacher, too. But India and China now graduate many times more qualified engineers than we do, and the “high school graduates” down at McDonald’s don’t know how to count change, and they can’t find Iraq on a map.

But they sure have a pantload of self-esteem.