The Remarkably Prescient Murray Rothbard

Benjamin Weingarten at Glenn Beck's The Blaze writes:

In a recent article, TheBlaze’s Fred Lucas noted a troubling aspect of the mindset driving Common Core. Lucas revealed that during an education panel at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, Common Core proponent and former Massachusetts education Secretary Paul Reveille stated “the children belong to all of us.”

Back in 2010, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan argued that schools should have a communal function stating:

“My vision is that schools need to be community centers. Schools need to be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day six, seven days a week, 12 months out of the year, with a whole host of activities, particularly in disadvantaged communities…Where schools truly become centers of the community, great things happen.”

In doing some research on progressive education, we came across “Education: Free & Compulsory,” a 1971 book written by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. In the book, Rothbard notes that Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, two of the first socialists in America, writing in the early-to-mid-1800s, outlined an education system eerily ideologically similar to that of Paul Reveille, Arne Duncan and other proponents of Common Core specifically and progressive education more broadly.

In fact, Wright and Owen start from Reveille’s premise that “the children belong to all of us,” and take this notion to its logical end that children should be taken away from their parents altogether and raised in public schools, more closely reflecting Duncan’s vision.

Check out the remarkably prescient passage from Rothbard’s book below [emphasis ours]:

“By the 1820s, their goals of compulsion and statism were already germinating over the country, and particularly flourishing in New England, although the individualist tradition was still strong. One factor that increased the power of New England in diffusing the collectivist idea in education was the enormous migration from that area. New Englanders swarmed south and west out of New England, and carried their zeal for public schooling and for State compulsion with them.

Into this atmosphere was injected the closest that the country had seen to Plato’s idea, of full State communistic control over the children. This was the plan of two of the first socialists in America—Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Owen was the son of one of the first British “Utopian” Socialists, and with Robert Owen, his father, had attempted an experiment in a voluntary-communist community in New Harmony, Indiana. Frances Wright was a Scotswoman who had also been at New Harmony, and with Owen, opened a newspaper called the Free Enquirer. Their main objective was to campaign for their compulsory education system. Wright and Owen outlined their scheme as follows

Read the rest here.

(ht Jason Peirce)