The School Revolution

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I
am a product of the public school system of a different time. Today’s system cannot be compared to the public school I attended in the small town of Green Tree, just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The highest authority in managing my school came from our neighbors
who served on the school board. It was a different era. I started in the first grade a few months before Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was the same school system that my dad, my aunts, and my uncles had attended.

There was nothing perfect about it—as I remember, both educational and disciplinary policies came up short—but compared to the average public schools in our cities and towns
today, it was safe, drug-free, and with no dropouts.

Both in grade school and high school, I remember there were fights and roughhousing, but never once were the police called.

In twelve years of public education, I do not recall any classmate who came from a broken home—never heard of a friend with divorced parents. Possibly, this was a reflection of the time in which I
lived.

One advantage we had then was the size of the school and classes. My eighth-grade class had twenty students—most of whom had been through the entire eight years together.

Each day the Bible was read, the Lord’s Prayer was said, and the Pledge of Allegiance was recited. No one objected, mainly because the school atmosphere reflected the values of the local community.
The federal government was not yet endowed with the authority to keep us safe from ourselves. That came later to the schools throughout the country, as responsibility moved from local schools to huge school districts, state-government controls, and finally the intrusions of the federal courts and federal bureaucrats. None of this existed back then.

The most aggressive “bending of the
rules” I did was sneak out and skip recess or intermission or gym class—a block of time with less supervision. I remember it clearly. I’d have to throw my coat out the window and then walk past a few teachers monitoring the corridors (who might have asked me questions as to why I was wearing a coat). Obviously, supervision of one’s coming and going wasn’t overly strict. Then I’d grab my bike and
hurry home, get my newspapers delivered rapidly, and arrive back at school to fall into place for the next class. My motivation was to be able to stay after school for basketball practice and not have to worry about delivering my papers late in the evening.

While in high school, at the age of fourteen, I worked in the local drugstore at the handsome wage of thirty-five cents per hour.
Looking back, I find it surprising that I sold and could buy cough medicine with codeine without a prescription or parental permission. I never saw one classmate abuse this “dangerous” drug. Sneaking a smoke was the big crime in which kids occasionally engaged.

In the summer, I worked for the school, painting, scrubbing, and cleaning. It was hard work, starting at 7:00
A.M.,
but I was
paid more than the thirty-five cents an hour I got at the drugstore.

In grade school, math was my best subject. All twenty of us in class got the same assignment: a list of problems to do and have checked individually by the teacher. Once the given problems were completed, we were allowed to loaf. The sooner I finished, the longer I could loaf while waiting for everyone to
catch up, all the while probably making noise and interrupting the others. It was a game for me, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized it would have been better for the school to adapt the teaching scenario to each student’s ability—something now well understood in homeschooling. Progressing at one’s own pace certainly makes sense.

Even for this small town, graduation from
elementary school was a big deal, complete with gowns and a fancy ceremony.

High school required traveling a few miles to the neighboring town of Dormont, since our population couldn’t support grades nine through twelve. This going next door for high school, an agreement between two towns, was nothing like the giant complexes we see today as a result of local communities losing control
over their schools and putting thousands of kids under one roof.

High school, in a similar fashion to grade school, had both good and bad teachers, but compared to today, the atmosphere was rather sedate. I witnessed some drinking, but I never saw any drug use nor was aware of any. Having witnessed a few classmates overindulging in alcohol made me respect—and, in a way, fear—the ill
effects of alcohol, and it was for that reason that I didn’t touch it in high school or college. This early experience was one of the reasons alcohol had no significant attraction for me. Besides, I never did feel the need to do something just because others were doing it. I enjoyed being different, especially if it made sense to me.

Having a great biology teacher in high school guided
me into the sciences in college. I give one particular teacher a lot of credit for my interest in biology and for my eventually getting into the premed program at Gettysburg College.

Running track was a huge event for me in high school, but also a great challenge, since some major knee injuries interfered with my athletic potential. Surgery back then was frequently more damaging than
the original injuries. There was no arthroscopic or noninvasive surgery available. My options in track became limited, but later on I found other races to run.

Today, it may not be races to run, but there are plenty of policies to push. This has been a great substitute for me throughout my life.

It was in high school where I met my wife, Carol, who was one grade behind me.
She claims she got to know about me was when she was in eighth grade, and watched me run as a freshman in high school. Our first date was on her birthday, when she was sixteen, on February 29, 1952. She chased me, and I finally caught her. We were married five years later, during my last year at Gettysburg.

My high school graduating class had 100 students. For me, small classes seemed
always to be best. There were 325 in my class at Gettysburg, and my Duke medical school class was just under 100.

In my early years at Gettysburg, I was undecided about my future. Since I was influenced by my high school biology teacher, I took biology my freshman year because it was a requirement to have taken a science course to earn a BS degree. That was a lucky break for me, as
it turned out.

Early on, I thought about teaching biology and about coaching. This led me to start working on a teacher’s certificate, since I would need a minor in education. That did not go well. The courses did not make a lot of sense to me—biology did.

In 1956 our education professor, head of the department, was gone for a few days on a trip to Washington, DC, to participate
in an important discussion regarding new programs of funding for education. He explained before he left that he was going on the trip with skepticism about government control over funding, but on his return, he told the class that the government had no intention of attaching any strings to funding, and would not interfere with the country’s educational process. Washington would be able to
help but would never take control. Though I was not political at the time, I recall wondering if that would be the case. The professor was dreaming; my instincts were correct.

Today, one thing is for certain: You cannot compare public education in a small town over fifty years ago to what’s happening in these gigantic schools in today’s cities, dominated by federal government and federal
courts and thousands of bureaucrats and controls and regulations—it’s a totally different world.

I’ve had several members of my family teach in public schools, and some are still involved. Our five children went through the public school system. But with each passing year, it becomes more difficult for me to remain complacent about the opportunities for young children now going to school.
Other options ought to be made available to them—all of them. That is why I wrote this book.

M
ore often than not, we do things a certain way in America strictly because they’ve already been done that way. Of course, we tinker with policies and institutions here and there, but generally speaking, we don’t want to rock the boat too much. The feeling in government seems to be that if something is up and running, ill-conceived
though it may be, it should be left by and large intact. The idea of fundamentally altering institutions is almost unthinkable to the powers that run our country. In the case of education—well, we have schools, we have education laws, and we have education policy on the books, so even though the education of youth is one of the most crucial aspects of life and paramount to the future of
our country, a real look at the nuts and bolts is never really on the table. But it is for me, and it should be for you, too.

When did this way of thinking begin for me? It was on a Sunday evening in 1971. Richard Nixon went on the air and made an announcement. He said he was suspending the last traces of the gold standard. Beginning immediately, the U.S. government would
no longer honor its promise to allow foreign governments and central banks to buy gold from the U.S. Treasury for $35 per ounce. That rule had been in operation ever since 1934. That was the year after Franklin Roosevelt unilaterally confiscated the gold owned by Americans, no matter where they lived. The government paid them $20.67 per ounce. As soon as it had possession of the gold, it hiked the
price to $35. That was a windfall profit of 75 percent.

In his suspension of the gold standard, Nixon had not consulted Congress any more than Roosevelt had in 1933. The official justification was this: Such an announcement of a proposed piece of legislation would have led to a run on the remaining gold. While Congress debated, foreign governments and central banks would have demanded
payment.

On that same day, Nixon announced full-scale price and wage controls. Again, Congress had not been consulted. He did this on his own authority. He called this declaration “the Challenge of Peace.” He announced a “New Economic Policy.” Ironically, this was what Lenin had called his fake capitalist reform in 1922, after the Soviet economy collapsed in hyperinflation. Nixon announced,
“The time has come for a new economic policy for the United States. Its targets are unemployment, inflation, and international speculation. And this is how we are going to attack those targets.”
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The next day, Leonard E. Read voiced his opposition to both decisions. Read was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, located in Irvington-on-Hudson, New
York. FEE began operations in 1946. It was the first free-market “think tank.” A decade later, FEE started publishing a monthly magazine,
The Freeman
. For the next two decades,
The Freeman
served as thousands of people’s introduction to libertarianism. Read used the word
libertarian
, but he preferred “the freedom philosophy.”

Beginning on August 15, 1971, I decided to devote
a big chunk of my life to a defense of the freedom philosophy. As part of that defense, I was committed to sound money: a full gold coin standard. My attitude was simple, and it was this: If it is true that we should go back to a gold standard, we should go back to the real one. I believed (and still believe) that the legal right of full gold coin redeemability on demand at a fixed price should
be extended to everyone, not just foreign governments and central banks. In this sense, my revolution began in 1971. It is still in full gear. I also argue that legalizing competitive currencies would be big step in the right direction.

My 2008 book,
The Revolution
, was a political one. It was a culmination of the ideas that shaped my 2007
campaign for the Republican Party’s nomination for president. The book, while political, was not what is sometimes called a campaign book. By the time I finished it, I sensed I would be dropping out of the race a short time later. I thought of it as a post-campaign book, meant to create new, long-term ways of thinking critically about the issues facing America. Yet it
was
a campaign book in this
sense: I hoped it would mobilize Americans on a permanent basis. I raised these issues again in my campaign in 2011 and 2012. I will continue to raise them now that I am out of Congress. I am not out of circulation.

I ended that book’s preface with these words:

My subject was politics. But politics is only one part of my work. Indeed, the freer the society, the smaller the political part is. To limit the work for liberty to politics is to play into the hands of numerous political interest groups with agendas that all boil down to this: social salvation by legislation. I simply do
not believe in that agenda.

I began chapter 5, “Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom,” with these words:

Because I see my work for liberty as extending far beyond politics, and because
I see that freedom is not divisible, I offer this book as the second phase of the revolution. It is related to politics only in this sense: it would take political action to repeal the bad laws governing education. But long before we can expect a majority of voters to oppose all state and federal aid to local school districts and other interventions, tens of millions of Americans will already
have pulled their children out of the local public schools. I’ll get into this later.

A free society
acknowledges
that authority over education begins with the family. I am not saying that a free society
grants
that authority. I do not believe that such authority is delegated by society. But a free society
acknowledges
that families have that authority. To the extent that any society
substitutes a source of authority over education other than the family, it departs from liberty.

The battle for liberty today is best seen institutionally in the battle over the control of education. It is far more visible than the battle over taxes, for example. The stakes are higher in education than in taxation—future voters are
trained in the principles of who should decide on taxes: voting rights, political power, tax rates, interest groups, etc.

The structure of education both reflects and reinforces the content of that education. And like everything else, to find out who is in charge of education, just follow the money. To find out why the structure of authority is the way it is in any school, follow the
money. Consistent tax-funded education does not look like family-funded education, just as bureaucratic management does not look like profit management.
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Whenever the funding of education differs, the structure and content of education differ. Why? Because the system of funding reflects and reinforces rival views about the way the world works, and how it should work.

The social war over education is therefore fundamental to the future of society. This may not be clear on every battlefield, let alone in every skirmish. But always, in the end, the contending social and political forces collide. There can be no permanent peace here. At best, there can be cease-fires.

In this book, I present a libertarian view of education, from kindergarten through
high school and college. This is a major social arena, where rival views are at war. I am calling you to commit to one side or the other.

I will make the case that liberty in education is basic to liberty in every other area of life. I will also make the point that the free market provides a wide variety of educational options. This diversity is now being multiplied through revolutionary
digital technology. Technology does two things. First, it cuts costs. Second, by cutting costs, it widens the market. As Adam Smith wrote in chapter 3 of
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), “The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” Through price competition on a scale never before seen, the Internet is extending the market for private education.

Those of us
who believe in diversity—free-market diversity, not politically correct diversity—rejoice in the Internet. We can see the future of liberty here. The future will be far more diverse, and competition in formal education will be part of this diversity. Formal education will be vastly cheaper than it is today, and also vastly superior.

Defenders of liberty are going to win this fight.
Technology is on our side. The free market is on our side. The potential for dramatically falling costs is on our side.

I am inviting you to join the winning side in a battle that has gone against us for more than 150 years. The tide is turning. Let me show you why.

This book is divided into three parts: “The Centrality of Education,”
“A Strategy for Educational Reform,” and “The Ideal School.” This reform project is a long-term one, just as the creation of compulsory state education was a long-term project.

Time is on our side. The state’s schools are visibly failing, and most people are not satisfied with them. Yet their costs right now are continually rising. So are local governments’ budget deficits. “The more
we pay, the worse it gets.” This is a basic rule of thumb and can generally be applied to everything run by the state.

Parents send their children to tax-funded schools because they see no cost-effective alternatives. In this book, I will show that there are cost-effective alternatives. One of them is my online curriculum (chapter 11). But there are many others.

So spend
some time thinking through what I have decided should be phase two of the revolution: educating and training the next generation of students.

We will win this battle for the minds of men and women. We will win it student by student.