Why Government Schooling Came to America

Control.

And the teachers unions are following an old script:
Horace Mann, the 19th-century godfather of American government schooling, summed up the anti-parent premise of state-run education in these terms: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”[6]

In 1864, the state superintendent of public instruction for California stated unequivocally the role that the State should play in the education of children: “The child should be taught to consider his instructor, in many respects, superior to the parent in point of authority. . . . [T]he vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.” To enforce the point, California Progressives even denied parents the right to criticize government schoolteachers. The California Penal Code declared: “Every parent, guardian, or other person, who upbraids, insults, or abuses any teacher of the public schools, in the presence or hearing of a pupil thereof, is guilty of a misdemeanor.”[7]

Backed by the State’s monopoly on coercive force, the new government schools created in nineteenth century America seized, in effect, children from their parents via compulsory attendance laws and then indoctrinated them with a government-mandated curriculum. What parents wanted for their children was beside the point. As the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association declared in 1865, your “children are the property of the state.”[8]