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Guest: Alan Schaeffer
… President of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State talks about why the state – by its nature – should not and cannot control education. Schools should be owned and operated privately.
- What is the purpose of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State website?
- What problems are intrinsic to a publicly run education system?
- Conformity and uniformity in education as inevitable in a government school system.
- About Horace Mann, the father of the American state school system: what did he believe a public education system would accomplish? The influence of the Prussian education system on Mann’s educational ideas.
- The purpose of public education is not education but “schooling??. How is true education different from schooling?
- Consciousness versus coercion.
- What is the “Alliance for the Separation of School and State” an alliance of?
- Before Horace Mann began to campaign for compulsory public education in Boston, what percent of the children were not getting a formal education?
- Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations about literacy in the USA before compulsory schooling.
- A surprising quote from Horace Mann.
- Does the Alliance claim that the State usurps the parents’ rights?
- How was state schooling sold to the American Public?
- What were the “Philadelphia Bible Riots”?
- Quote from the Communist party regarding compulsory state education.
- The mind frame of social control and power versus the mind frame of freedom.
- The effect of the conventional wisdom passed on to the populace by state schooling.
- Undermining the politically weak.
- How large is the public education budget in the USA?
- Vested interests.
- Distinguishing “capitalism” from “capitalists” and from “fascism”.
- Freedom, coercion, truth, and untruth.
- A crucial educational problem of the “common school”: avoidance of discussion on areas in which we disagree.
- “Critical Literacy”
- “Multiculturalism” and “tolerance”