Kirkpatrick argues that the goal of education should be to cultivate self-esteem and independence and reject coercion and rationalism, thereby freeing the young mind and encouraging children “to be actively curious and practically self-assured.” To achieve these goals, he constructs a theory based on “concentrated attention,” a psychological concept central to the educational theories of Italian educator and philosopher Maria Montessori. Kirkpatrick defines concentrated attention as the “heightened awareness of one object out of the many that exist in our field of awareness.” According to Kirkpatrick, most educational approaches seek to either coerce children or neglect them altogether, but concentrated attention focuses on educational methods that nurture the child. He meticulously details the proper methods of employing concentrated attention and also outlines the content of education—the knowledge, values, and skills—needed to thrive in a free society.

Where did the idea of concentrated attention come from? Kirkpatrick finds its first clear expression among the child-centered educational theories of Enlightenment thinkers like John Amos Comenius, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the nineteenth century Johann Pestalozzi, Johann Herbart, and Friedrich Froebel further developed the psychological and philosophical foundations of child-centered education. In the early twentieth century John Dewey and Maria Montessori provided the modern theoretical foundations of the concept of concentrated attention. One may have wished, as I did, that Kirkpatrick had augmented this chapter by discussing the slew of dubious child-centered educational practices that followed Dewey and Montessori. Even so, Kirkpatrick’s history of child-centered versus teacher-centered theories of education is highly instructive.

While Montessori’s ideas provide a solid foundation to Kirkpatrick’s theory, Dewey’s educational theories appear to undermine it. Dewey was a collectivist who sought to use state-sponsored coercion to properly “socialize” children. In isolation, some of Dewey’s ideas may resemble Montessori’s concept of concentrated attention, but Dewey wasn’t interested in cultivating independent young minds. He was interested in using public schools to cultivate dependency on the State.

In defense of his use of Dewey’s ideas, Kirkpatrick argues against conflating Dewey’s political and educational philosophies. On one hand, Kirkpatrick acknowledges that Dewey and his Progressive colleagues sought government control over schooling. On the other, he suggests that Progressives wanted to free students from coercive educational environments by urging public schools to adopt student-centered instructional approaches. Kirkpatrick calls this a “contradiction,” but many critics maintain that Dewey’s political and educational philosophies were compatible. For example, in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that Dewey assumed “a kind of pre-established harmony between the needs and interest of the child and ‘the society we should like to realize.’” Kirkpatrick’s effort at separating Dewey’s political and educational philosophy is not entirely persuasive.

It is also difficult to agree with Kirkpatrick’s contention that there is an underlying compatibility between the educational theories of Dewey and Montessori. Dewey identified serious differences between his educational theories and Montessori’s. In Schools of Tomorrow, for example, he argued that Montessori adhered to “older” psychological theories, which asserted that “people have ready-made faculties which can be trained and developed for general purposes.” Dewey boasted that he ascribed to “newer” psychological theories, which claimed that children have “special impulses of action to be developed through their use in preserving and perfecting life in the social and physical conditions under which it goes on.” These substantive differences in their basic assumptions about the nature of learning required fundamental differences in their respective instructional approaches.

Aside from the difficulties of attempting to redeem Dewey’s educational thought, one nagging problem with Kirkpatrick’s book is that while he acknowledges that the content of education would be “freely chosen by the education consumer in a marketplace of ideas,” he doesn’t concede that consumers should also freely choose the method of education.

There is no guarantee that parents would flock to schools that implemented educational approaches based on concentrated attention. In a free market in education, parents who want to raise their children to become confident, independent adults might find concentrated attention-based instruction a desirable alternative to existing educational approaches. Even if they don’t, they should have the choice. Kirkpatrick’s success is in offering them a choice worthy of attention.

Henry Edmondson describes his book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, as “a simple exegesis of Dewey’s writing, with commentary suggesting how his thought finds expression in contemporary American education.” He reminds us that ideas have consequences, and Dewey’s ideas have had disastrous consequences for American education over the past 50 years.

Anyone who attempts to write about John Dewey’s ideas is immediately presented with two problems. The first is selecting works from the vast corpus of writing by and about Dewey. The Collected Works of John Dewey covers 71 years of Dewey’s writing in a mere 37 volumes, while the Library of Congress lists 375 books written about Dewey alone. Edmondson, who teaches political science at Georgia College and State University, focuses on four of Dewey’s major works, Democracy and Education, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, Schools of Tomorrow, and Experience and Education. He also draws from a number of Dewey’s other major works in educational philosophy, political and social philosophy, and ethics, as well as a wide range of secondary source material. Overall, Edmondson’s coverage of Dewey’s thought is excellent.

The second problem is Dewey’s awful prose and ambiguous ideas. Even William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, both admiring colleagues in the famed Metaphysical Club, recognized that Dewey’s writing was often vague and confusing. Although Edmondson agrees that Dewey was an abysmal communicator, he argues that readers can overcome Dewey’s lack of clarity by recognizing that he “subordinates his philosophy to his [progressive] politics.” Using that approach, Edmonson is able to provide a succinct overview of Dewey’s ideas without being weighed down by his writing.

Throughout the book, Edmonson highlights Dewey’s disdain for religion, tradition, and inherited values. Dewey claimed that such beliefs are at least signs of unintelligent thinking and, at worst, outright oppression by the wealthy and powerful. Philosophically, Dewey argued that, because human nature is always in flux, fixed values and beliefs are inimical to progress. Consequently, he declared that schools should no longer be a venue for teaching traditional religious and moral values. Instead, Dewey believed that schools should be places where the child’s impulse and whim rule—insofar as those impulses and whims are consistent with the values of Progressivism.

Dewey did not, however, contend that schools should be places of uninhibited activity, as many unfamiliar with his work believe. Edmondson points out that Dewey was a man blinded by his desire to see schools as the means to implement a comprehensive program of progressive social change. As a “microcosm of social life,” the school provided Dewey a convenient place to socialize students into adherents of progressive ideals, that is, collectivism and statism.

Dewey also rejected religion and traditional values in favor of encouraging perpetual experimentation via the scientific method. Edmondson sees this as a streak of nihilism in Dewey’s thought, which might be the most worrisome consequence of adopting pedagogy based on his ideas. One needs to look no further than the legion of constructivist-based programs, such as “I Like Me” and “values clarification,” to identify the kind of destructive influence Dewey’s ideas have had on schooling in the United States.

Within the classroom Dewey insisted that teachers should not impose abstract aims or external standards on their students. Instead, he endorsed learning through play and hands-on activities, and defended an ad hoc curriculum that favored neither vocational nor academic subjects. Dewey maintained that socialization was just as important as teaching essential skills like reading. Edmondson concludes that our current confusion over standards and goals is a “natural consequence of Dewey’s insistence on such fluid educational standards.”

Edmondson includes chapters on the educational thought of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. What might appear to be an unusual detour is actually a very instructive discussion of alternatives to Dewey. At times, Dewey insisted that he was heir apparent to Jefferson, but Edmondson shows that Dewey departed from both Jefferson and Franklin by repudiating those Founders’ shared belief that a vibrant republic requires an education designed to cultivate personal virtue. Dewey’s radicalism is nowhere more apparent than in his rejection of the Founders’ educational ideals.

Finally, Edmondson offers a number of ways that we can renounce our Deweyite inheritance. They fall into two broad categories: philosophical coherence and excellence in teaching. Philosophical coherence includes implementing reforms that restore clarity, traditional values, and the liberal arts to our schools. Edmondson also calls for the abolition of the middle-school, schools of education, and student-learning outcomes, all of which impede genuine educational innovation. He also wants to encourage excellence in teaching by maximizing teacher autonomy and improving teacher preparation.

Those aren’t bad ideas, but what we really need is the one reform that cuts the Gordian Knot—separation of school and state. Dewey’s philosophy would probably never have taken root and wouldn’t last long in an environment where parents made their own choices and spent their own money for education.

Before there was Rudolf Flesch there was Hilda Neatby.

In 1955 Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read, a bestseller that charged the U.S. educational system with malfeasance for not correctly teaching young students how to read.

Two years earlier Hilda Neatby (1904–75), a University of Saskatchewan history professor, rocked the boat north of the border with So Little for the Mind. Illiteracy was so rampant in Canadian schools that it was considered normal: “It is simply assumed that many secondary school boys and girls cannot read.”¹ But this deficiency, Neatby argued, was merely a symptom of a deeper ill: a de-emphasis of learning in favor of turning out students who were well “socialized” but whose gross level of ignorance was of little import. High school students could not understand math problems “expressed in perfectly grammatical and unambiguous English,” but so what? “It is never suggested that there should be a pons asinorum over which non-readers may not pass.”²

Like Flesch’s, Neatby’s book hit raw nerves. By December 1953, only two months after publication, it had already gone through a second printing and into its second edition. In a preface to that edition she dealt with the furor of protest she had aroused. She denied having “passed a sweeping condemnation” on the educational establishment and explained her purpose with another subtle jab, citing a French expression without translation: “Je n’oppose pas; je ne propose pas; j’expose.”³ She also responded to critics who claimed that her alleged “intemperance of language” had provoked “hostility” in “educational breasts”: “I refuse to believe that any of our responsible educational leaders would be deterred by faults in the form of my criticism from remedying the weaknesses which I may have succeeded in exposing.”⁴ Touché encore.

But both Flesch and Neatby, despite their early triumphs, eventually lost out to the educationists. Flesch published a 1981 sequel, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, detailing how the educationists had mollified incensed parents and other critics by talking about reforms but failing to make substantive changes. Today the public schools still turn out a scandalously high proportion of students who are crippled by the printed page. And in Canada the contemporary schools appear to be in disarray, according to the 1993 book Rituals of Failure by journalist Sandro Contenta. Inmates are suffused by demoralization, dispiritedness, and a sense of futility. Students’ resistance to authority translates into resistance to learning.

The question provoked by Neatby and Flesch and other mid-twentieth-century critics of publicly funded schooling is, how can it be improved? The debate rages yet today. But in light of a half century of additional ineffectualness since Neatby and Flesch burst into prominence, it is clear that the question itself needs to be improved.

It should be restated thus: Why should there be any publicly funded schooling at all?

The most powerful argument against tax-supported schools was listed by educational historian Ellwood Cubberley among the reasons propounded for them in the first half of the nineteenth century: “That the taking over of education by the State is . . . the exercise of the State’s inherent right to self-preservation and improvement”; and “That only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand.”⁵

Such intrinsic power granted to the state should provoke alarm. The state’s interests are allowed to supersede those of parents. The schooling structure becomes a political jousting ground for groups with competing views about what the “welfare of the State may demand.” Since social control is implicit, the system attracts persons with a hunger for domination whether for personal or ideological reasons. The goal of social indoctrination and manipulation may foster not the advancement of enlightenment but the maintenance of ignorance. In the absence of competition, the state enterprise is enabled to function in the historic tradition of socialism: Political and administrative power is retained through the overstating of achievements and the shifting of blame for failures.

Maintaining Control

The market for literacy is 100 percent of the population. A competitive, totally private learning industry paid directly by customers would seek assiduously to satisfy every last one with maximum value for the prices charged. By contrast, the publicly funded schooling bureaucracy’s overriding concern is not to teach youngsters how to read but rather to keep its control intact, its revenue flows unstanched, and its critics at bay.

The United States began its journey into state-controlled educational bureaucracy with the “common school” movement that first bore fruit in the 1830s. The so-called “father of the common school” was Horace Mann, who as initial secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education pioneered the path for imposing statewide standards and curricula on all local schools. Joel Spring noted that Mann was a phrenologist and temperance activist who hoped that “the mental faculties could be developed and shaped to create a moral and good individual and, consequently, a moral and just society.”⁶ He quotes from Mann’s diary while Mann was contemplating the 1837 offer to lead the Massachusetts Board: “When will a society, like a mother, take care of all her children?”⁷ On accepting the position, Mann wrote, “Henceforth, so long as I hold this office, I devote myself to the supremest welfare of mankind upon earth.”⁸

Mann’s best-known Canadian counterpart was Egerton Ryerson, who was chief superintendent of schools for Ontario and who centralized provincial authority over local schools under the School Act of 1846. Sandro Contenta cited a scholar’s assertion that “Ryerson set up the first Canadian system of mass social control” and also noted that Ryerson “believed a publicly funded, universal school system would create stability by training the population in their duties towards the political order.”⁹

A century later the primary problem with the training, according to Hilda Neatby, was that it had been commandeered by the disciples of the American educational theorist John Dewey. She wrote, “Dewey, more than any other single person, must be held responsible for the intellectual, cultural and moral poverty of much modern teaching.”¹⁰

Neatby had come to national prominence as a member of the so-called Massey Commission, which from 1949 to 1951 investigated Canadian cultural life and the threat of cultural domination by the national neighbor to the south. The aridity of the provincial schooling systems became clear during the commission’s public hearings, and afterwards its head, Vincent Massey, who became Canadian governor general from 1952 to 1957, “pushed [Neatby] to write a book on the state of primary and secondary education in Canada” and secretly provided financial backing for the project.¹¹

Neatby delineated “the intellectual barbarism and moral anarchy which are threatening Canadian schools.”¹² She found a “mania for equality and for the ‘socialized’ existence”and “a scorn of the intellect” that were rooted in Dewey’s slogan, “Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal.”¹³ But Deweyite efforts to prepare children for socialized participation in democracy would be ultimately contraductive: “Experts talk constantly of training for leadership, but their whole system is one of conditioning for servitude. This is disastrous to the well-being of democracy which depends for safety on the free development of the highest qualities of gifted individuals.”¹⁴ Neatby perceived incipient tyranny: “For all his talk of democracy, the educator is generally authoritarian and dogmatic. Teacher-training institutions in general exist to indoctrinate; their task is not to discover truth, but to convey ‘the truth.’”¹⁵

Not Alone

Neatby and Flesch were not the only North Americans during the mid-century to write about educational malfeasance. Bernard Iddings Bell in 1949 stated the widespread belief that “the millions of dollars which we devote every year to high-school education are, for the most part, money spent for the retarding of intelligence, the discouragement of efficiency, the stunting of character.”¹⁶ Mortimer Smith wrote the same year, “What borders on the criminal is the poor teaching and neglect of those subjects that deal with the history of ideas and ideals, a knowledge of which is essential to all youth who would assume their place in society as thinking, feeling human beings.”¹⁷

The underlying message of Bell’s and Smith’s criticisms is that the political institution of public schooling needed to be captured from the opposition and controlled by those in agreement with them. But the framers of the federal Constitution understood the necessity of fragmenting political institutions so as to keep them too weak to foster tyranny. Bell approvingly acknowledged that “the sole purpose of the State, as the founders of America saw things, the only justification for government, is to keep people from interfering with one another. A nation exists for the sake of its free citizens and not an enslaved citizenry for the sake of the nation.”¹⁸

But then he took a leap in an unexpected direction. His first recommendation for reform, emphatic enough that he wrote it in italics, was that “the teaching profession must be organized more widely and definitely than it now is, to see to it that the public is aroused, first of all, to insist on adequate financial support of education and, secondly, to resist all political control, all attempts to transform the schools, colleges, and universities into agencies for the spreading of government-devised propaganda.”¹⁹

The irony is that a half century later the teachers are organized but have become entrenched political instruments for the spreading of statist propaganda.

The logical means for keeping public schooling from malfeasing is to shut it down entirely. It becomes suitably weak when it does not exist.

“There are few agreements in education,” Contenta wrote. “Everyone and their relatives seem to have a different idea of what schools should be doing.”²⁰ That comment sounds like an argument for total privatization of the learning industry, the abolition of tax-supported schooling. Consumers have different ideas about which products and services best suit them. They naturally seek value in the marketplace. A completely privatized learning market would be no different. Competitive providers would seek to maximize their own gain by offering a variety of learning services tailored to reach different market segments with the greatest possible efficiency at the lowest possible cost.

The ritual herding of the young into state-prescribed confinement persists mainly because it is just that, a ritual of such hoariness as to be largely unquestioned. Fifty years after Hilda Neatby offended her nation’s government educational establishment, the way to the superior system she advocated is becoming clearer—get government out of it and let the nonpoliticized free market take over.

1. Hilda Neatby, So Little for the Mind (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1953), p. 157.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. vi.
4. Ibid., p. vii.
5. Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), p. 121.
6. JoelSpring, The AmericanSchool, 1642–1985 (New York: Longman, Inc., 1986), p. 83.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 84.
9. Sandro Contenta, Rituals of Failure (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993), p. 14.
10. Neatby, p. 24.
11. Michael Hayden, So Much To Do, So Little Time—The Writings of Hilda Neatby (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), p. 32.
12. Neatby, p. 238.
13. Ibid., pp. 236, 321, 251.
14. Ibid., p. 236.
15. Ibid., pp. 116–17.
16. Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), pp. 54–55.
17. Mortimer Smith, And Madly Teach (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), p. 11.
18. Bell, pp. 181–82.
19. Ibid., p. 202.
20. Contenta, p. 11.

Reviewed by Robert Holland

In his 1996 book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, E.D. Hirsch categorized and then proceeded to demolish the doctrines of progressive education that hold American education in thrall. Hirsch exposed the intellectual shallowness behind such notions as “child-centered schooling,” “multiple intelligences,” “authentic assessment,” and “constructivism.” He also traced the origins of progressive education to the Teachers College, Columbia University, in the teens and twenties.

The “education schools” of the nation have mindlessly perpetuated this anti-intellectual tradition and passed it along to new teachers.

The Hirsch tome, it turns out, was the first of a powerful one-two punch. In Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, education historian and Brookings scholar Diane Ravitch has written an extraordinary review of 100 years of education fads. Where Hirsch critiqued ideas, Ravitch names names and provides dates so that it is possible to assign responsibility.

Among the first progressives she identifies is G. Stanley Hall, winner of the first doctorate in psychology from Harvard. In 1901 Hall declared before the National Education Association that guardians of the young “should strive first of all to keep out of nature’s way.” Educators, declared Hall, “must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry.” There are many children, he asserted, who would be better off not being educated at all.

The elitist-progressive hostility to such core academic subjects as history, literature, algebra, and chemistry clashed with the desire of immigrant parents for their children to have a solid grounding in English and the American heritage. The intellectual heirs of Rousseau sought instead to impose a system of social efficiency whereby children would be sorted at an early age into useful occupations. They created industrial schools for children as young as 12 and junior high schools for the specific purpose of tracking children toward predetermined vocations.

The progressives’ penchant for pigeonholing children and selling their intellectual potential short has resurfaced periodically under deceptive new labels. In late ’30s and ’40s it was the infamous “life adjustment” movement, which amazingly held that 60 percent of American children lacked the brains to aspire either to college or to skilled employment. The benevolent schools would have to “adjust” them to be decent drones. With a 1945 U.S. Office of Education conference playing a pivotal role, “life adjustment” steered most children away from books and academics and toward home and family living, vocational guidance, and such vital questions as “What causes pimples?”

Even now, when economic change would seem to put a premium on broadly educated people, progressives seek to shove aside classical disciplines in favor of attitudes, “real-world” concerns, and a niche in a government-managed workforce. In the 1990s that mindset showed up in such freshly minted fads as Outcome-Based Education and the federal School-to-Work system, though Ravitch chooses not to mention either abomination by name. Whether from a lack of candor or an excess of modesty, she also fails to mention her own prominent involvement as an Education Department higher-up during the first Bush Administration in the failed movement toward national education standards.

The most eye-opening chapter in Left Back relates the fondness that the progressives’ hero, philosopher John Dewey, developed for the system of education in the Soviet Union. Dewey relished the fact that the Marxists had hammered schools into agencies of social uplift, with teachers leading students in applied “project” learning—taking them into the community for problem-solving in sanitation systems or bringing the peasants around to the communist way of thinking. This demonstrated a naïve affection for statist use of schools as instruments of a new social order. Progressives still see them that way.

From a century’s litter of failed fads, Ravitch concludes that anything in education labeled a “movement” ought to be “avoided like the plague.” That seems to be a wise caution when one considers the likes of the self-esteem movement, the whole-language movement, the multicultural movement, and dozens of other mindless education fads.

Both Ravitch and Hirsch are education egalitarians in the best sense. In contrast to the progressives who would level us down by draining intellectual content from mass education, they believe all children can benefit from a core curriculum grounded in the liberal arts. If they err on the side of idealism, they are at least correct that it is wrong to sell children short without giving them a chance to master serious subject matter.

Robert Holland is a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute, a public-policy think tank in Arlington, Va.

Born in 1870, he witnessed the severe societal changes resulting from world wars, revolutions in ideology, and the consequences of political measures passed decades earlier. He watched with particular concern as American schools abandoned classical education in favor of the less disciplined liberal arts approach favored by John Dewey and his followers. Nock charted what he saw as the disastrous consequences to American society of democratizing education. In doing so, he opposed one of the most popular trends of the early twentieth century: mass education.

Michael Wreszin, author of The Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock, called popular education “the watchword of the progressive era” because “no other field of reform promised such grand possibilities.” The public school system was viewed as an invaluable means to reconstruct society by molding the generations to come. In his watershed book Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey wrote that popular education should be used as a conscious tool to remove social evil and promote social good. Slowly, the classical curricula aimed at rigorous education including, for example, Lain and a stress on history were replaced by programs aimed at creating “good citizens.”

In the optimistic years before World War I, Nock enthusiastically embraced the “new education.” On seeing its application, however, he became one of Dewey’s earliest and staunchest critics. Nock’s later admirers attempted to revive classical education. Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, and Robert Maynard Hutchins translated their love of a classical curriculum into the Great Books program. But it was not until the 1950s, when the alleged superiority of Russian scientific knowledge and training became a national concern, that Americans seriously questioned whether public schools adequately educated their children.

Nock’s critiques of the American educational experiment ring fresh today because they offered fundamental objections to the underlying theories of popular education. He rejected, for example, educational egalitarianism. He saw no reason to believe that equal rights and treatment under the law implied that everyone had equal intellectual capacities any more than it implied that everyone would grow to the same height.

Yet he was careful to praise the intentions of parents who sent their children to public schools. In his book Free Speech and Plain Language, Nock wrote: “The representative American, whatever his faults, has been notably characterized by the wish that his children might do better by themselves than he could do by himself…. [I]n its essence and intention our system [of education] may be fairly called no less than an organization of this desire; and as such it can not be too much admired or too highly praised.” Nevertheless, public schools were doomed to fail because “from beginning to end” they were “gauged to the run-of-mind American rather than to the picked American.” They were designed to accommodate the lowest intellectual denominator, rather than the highest.

For his views on education, some commentators have called Nock an elitist. Be that as it may, the probing questions he asked about American education and its impact on the American character deserve to be explored and answered.

Nock: The Man

Albert Jay Nock was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a respectable but poor family, which relocated a few years afterward to Brooklyn, New York. He learned to read without formal assistance by staring at a news clipping posted on his wall until, at the age of three, he could spell out words. The first book to catch his fancy was Webster’s Dictionary, which he read for the sheer joy of learning language. His father was an Episcopal clergyman and thus no stranger to providing instruction, but he exercised only unobtrusive guidance over his son’s self-education, which included mastery of Greek and Latin.

Eventually, Nock went to a private preparatory school in order to pass the entrance examinations for college. Of the private school, Nock stated that the students were never told not to put “beans up our noses, or subjected to any sniveling talk about being on our honour, or keeping up the credit of the dear old school, or any such odious balderdash. Nevertheless, we somehow managed to behave decently.” In short, students were left alone to learn at their own pace, being given only the instruction they requested or clearly required.

At college St. Stephen’s, now Bard College, the same spirit of academic independence reigned. Nock wrote, “We were made to understand that the burden of education was on us and no one else, least of all our instructors; they were not there to help us carry it or to praise our efforts, but to see that we shouldered it in proper style and got on with it.” Being given the opportunity to pursue knowledge and then being left alone to do so remained Nock’s ideal. Robert M. Crunden’s biography, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock (1964), contains the following anecdote:

Nock’s friend, Edward Epstean, told him, “You’ve done a great deal for all those young people [who worked at Nock's magazine, The Freeman].”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything for them except leave them alone,” Nock said.

“Yes, I understand,” answered Epstean. “But if someone else had been letting them alone, it would have been a very different story.”

Nock did some graduate work at Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut, then decided in 1897 to be ordained as a minister of the Episcopal Church. After 12 years, he withdrew from preaching to join the staff of the American Magazine, where he stayed until 1914.

During this period, he developed a specific social philosophy. He became a single-taxer a follower of the classical-liberal reformer Henry George because he believed that private ownership of land led to monopoly and, in turn, a war between labor and capital. By abolishing all taxes save one on land, that war, as well as extremes of “unearned” wealth, could be avoided.¹

As a pacifist, Nock opposed American entry into both world wars. As a radical individualist, he spoke out against collectivism and the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nock was deeply influenced by Franz Oppenheimer’s masterpiece, The State, published in German in 1908, with an English translation in 1915. Oppenheimer argued that people achieved their goals, including basic survival, either by economic means (work) or by political means (theft). Nock immediately adopted this distinction and used it as a touchstone in his social analysis. Although Nock was often called a liberal, he rejected the label, preferring to call himself a radical. To him, a liberal used the political means to improve and expand the State as a social institution. Nock proposed to eliminate the State from society. (He distinguished the State from the government.) His unswerving suspicion of the State the political means—would be key to his approach to public education.

In 1920 Nock, along with the British classical liberal Francis Neilson, founded the individualist periodical The Freeman.² By the time it closed in 1924, Nock had gained wide respect as an editor.

While teaching briefly at Bard College, Nock delivered what are known as the Page-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia. There he roundly defended classical education against the theories of Dewey. The lectures were published in book form as The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). From February 1936 to September 1939 Nock wrote a series of monthly essays for the American Mercury titled “The State of the Union.” This series won him renown as a writer.³

Nock’s Laws of Social Order

Before discussing the specifics of Nock’s theories on education, it is useful to examine the more fundamental principles, or laws, with which he approached any social issue.

In Free Speech and Plain Language, Nock explained that “With regard to . . . all . . . aspects of our equalitarian social theory, my only aim is the humble one of suggesting that we bear in mind the disregard that nature has for unintelligent good intentions, and the vixenish severity with which she treats them.” He believed three laws defined social life: Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law, and the law of diminishing returns and he wanted people, particularly through government, to stop trying to thwart those “natural laws.”

Nock’s first law of social order was named after his friend Edward E. Epstean from whom he first heard the principle. As rephrased in Free Speech and Plain Language, the law is, “Man tends to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Not, it must be understood, that he always does so satisfy them, for other considerations principle, convention, fear, superstition or what not may supervene; but he always tends to satisfy them with the least possible exertion, and, in the absence of a stronger motive, will always do so.” Nock applied this law to the political means. He believed that as long as the State could “confer an economic advantage at the mere touch of a button,” people would maneuver to “get at the button, because law-made property is acquired with less exertion than labour-made property.”

Nock’s second law was adapted from Gresham’s law on the nature of currency. Simply stated: bad money drives out good. When government dictates equivalency of value, the worst form of currency will circulate and the better money will disappear. Nock extended Gresham’s law to cover culture. He asked the reader to imagine a concert being played for an audience of 300 randomly chosen people. He argued that the program would not include the best music produced through the centuries, but the most popular music of the moment. So too with education: bad education would drive out good. Mass education did nothing more than reduce the quality of education to what Nock called “the dreadful average.”

Nock’s third law was based on the law of diminishing returns. He wrote that “The law of diminishing returns is fundamental to industry. It formulates the fact, which strikes one as curiously unnatural that, when a business has reached a certain point of development, returns begin to decrease, and they keep on decreasing as further development proceeds.” Consider the experience of vacationing at a location that has not yet been “discovered” by floods of tourists. When tourists begin to flock to the location, the return to everyone abruptly decreases. In accommodating popular demands, the vacation site (like other things in life) falls prey to the law of diminishing returns.

For Nock, the third law contradicted a great myth of American education, namely, that “if a few qualified persons get this [educational] benefit, anybody, qualified or unqualified, may get it.” But the “margin of diminishing returns” mandates that “the larger the proportion of unqualified persons” who attempt to receive the benefit, the swifter the benefits to all will vanish.

Education versus Training

In The Theory of Education in the United States, Nock claimed that American public schools were “based upon the assumption, popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the start.” Nock questioned it. As noted, he did not believe that equal rights and equal treatment under the law held any implication for equal intellectual ability.

Nock made a crucial distinction between being “educable” and being “trainable.” An educated person was one who had profited from absorbing “formative” knowledge. As a result, he had developed “the power of disinterested reflection”; that is, he could reason toward truth, unencumbered by emotional reactions or prejudice. Rather than aiming at a vocational goal, education aimed at the joy of ideas and produced men to whom learning was pleasure. A knowledge of Greek and Latin was particularly important, in Nock’s view, because it allowed people to view the record of inquiring human minds for over 2,500 years.

In On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays, Nock explained that education produced “intelligenz” [sic] “the power invariably, in Plato’s phrase, to see things as they are, to survey them and one’s own relations to them with objective disinterestedness, and to apply one’s consciousness to them simply and directly, letting it take its own way over them uncharted by prepossession, unchanneled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula.” The educated man was capable of independent thought. Unfortunately, Nock believed few people were educable.

By contrast, Nock thought most people could be trained. The trainable person profited from instrumental knowledge. In his essay “The Nature of Education,” Nock explained that “When you want chemists, mechanics, engineers, bond-salesmen, lawyers, bankers and so on, you train them; training, in short, is for a vocational purpose. Education contemplates another kind of product.” Nock did not mean to denigrate those who should be trained rather than educated. He wrote in his memoirs that “Education, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in a way of an Emerson; while training, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the way of an Edison.” Thus to Nock, science was a matter of training and many of the world’s most eminent men were not educated but trained. “Training is excellent,” he wrote in Free Speech and Plain Language, “and it can not be too well done, and opportunity for it can not be too cheap and abundant.”

The main problem with the American educational system was that, in attempting to educate everyone equally, it encountered Gresham’s law and ended up educating no one adequately. Instead, it provided only training, even to those who were educable. He believed that, in his era, “the study of history, like other formative studies, does not even rise to the dignity of being a waste of time. What with the political, economic and theological capital that has to be made of it… it is a positive detriment to mind and spirit.” Indeed, he continued in The Book of Journeyman (1930), “Following the strange American dogma that all persons are educable, and following the equally fantastic popular estimate placed upon mere numbers, our whole educational system has watered down its requirements to something precious near the moron standard. The American curriculum in ‘the liberal arts’ is a combination of bargain-counter, grab-bag and Christmas-tree.”

Nock’s solution? The two categories of people should attend separate learning centers. As a blueprint, Nock praised Thomas Jefferson’s scheme for public education. In Free Speech and Plain Language, Nock wrote that “when Mr. Jefferson was revising the Virginia Statutes in 1797, he drew up a comprehensive plan for public education. Each ward should have a primary school for the R’s, open to all. Each year the best pupil in each school should be sent to the grade-school, of which there were to be twenty, conveniently situated in various parts of the state. They should be kept there one year or two years, according to results shown, and then all dismissed but one, who should be continued six years. . . . At the end of six years, the best ten out of the twenty were to be sent to college, and the rest turned adrift.”

Unfortunately, Nock’s praise of Jefferson’s education scheme did not include a counterbalancing criticism of how this system was to be financed namely, from the public trough. As an anarchist, Nock must have opposed a tax-supported school system, but his comments give the opposite impression. For example, of Jefferson’s scheme, he wrote, “As an expression of sound public policy, this plan has never been improved upon.”

As noted, dividing society into the “educable” and the “trainable” left Nock vulnerable to charges of elitism, especially when considered in conjunction with his theory of “the Remnant” the select few of mankind on whom falls the burden of maintaining and advancing civilization. But his questions and insights cannot be dismissed lightly.

For example, sensitive to the difference between an individual and a citizen of a State, Nock believed that public schools were more interested in turning out good citizens than good individuals. For one thing, educated people were likely to question the political system. He wrote that “Education… leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life. . . . and it begets dissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simple returns. A good income, a home and family, the usual run of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressed only to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation—training not only makes directly for getting these, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present society has to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does, and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this.” When you educate a man, you send him “out to shift for himself with a champagne appetite amidst a gin-guzzling society.”

In her introduction to Nock’s Snoring as a Fine Art, Suzanne La Follette paid tribute to her friend and colleague in terms that would have surely delighted him. She spoke of his unique talent for recognizing and encouraging ability in anyone he met. And she cautioned that his benevolence to those of ability was not “a conscious service to society or his country or even to the beneficiary. It was, I suppose, the teacher’s instinct in him; the instinct to serve truth. But he never tried to impose his truth on his pupil. Rather, he was concerned to put the pupil in the way to find truth for himself as if he had revised the Biblical saying, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,’ to read, ‘Ye shall be free in order that ye may know the truth.’”

1. Editor’s Note: See Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, Vol. II (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing Corporation, 1970 [1962]), pp. 512-13,813-14.

2. That publication was not formally related to The Freeman that is the predecessor of Ideas on Liberty, which was founded later by admirers of Nock.

3. See Albert Jay Nock, The State of the Union.’ Essays in Social Criticism, ed. Charles H. Hamilton, 1991.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between traditional liberals and twentieth century liberals is their attitude toward man. The traditional liberal thinks in terms of man as an individual. The twentieth century liberal thinks of man as a member of a group. The traditional liberal agrees with John Stuart Mill that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, to interfere with the liberty of action of any of their members is self protection.”

The twentieth century liberal thinks that society should interfere with the liberty of the individual whenever it serves the interests of the groups to which the individuals belong. Thus the closed shop and the union shop deny employment to the individual who is not a union member or who refuses to join a union. This infringement upon the liberty of the individual workman is justified upon the grounds that it makes the union strong—that it benefits the group to which the individual workman belongs or which he should be forced to join. The same reasoning is used to justify infringements upon the liberty of individual farmers. For example, in 1955 Joseph Blattner, a poultry raiser of Norristown, Pennsylvania, was fined because he raised more wheat than the government decreed. Blattner raises his own wheat to feed his six thousand chickens and raises no wheat to sell. His freedom to raise wheat on his own land to feed his own chickens was denied on the theory that crop controls are good for farmers generally.

The twentieth century liberal is always eager to limit the liberty of the individual for the real or fancied benefit of the groups to which he belongs. The emphasis upon the importance of the group is strikingly illustrated in the trend of modern education. Our twentieth century liberal educators take the view that the subject matter taught in our schools is of minor importance—that the real purpose of education is to teach children to cooperate. In other words, the purpose of education is not learning, but is to teach children to become cooperative members of groups. The traditional liberal thinks in terms of man as an individual. The twentieth century liberal thinks of man as a member of a group.

The new liberals faced a dilemma. How could they justify the infringements upon individual liberty which they advocated and still call themselves liberals? How could they still call themselves liberals if liberalism was identified with individual freedom? The answer was to redefine freedom and make it mean its opposite. They found the answer they sought in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx. Hegel taught that when man follows his own base desires, he is not free. He taught that man is subordinate to a higher force or purpose, and that he becomes free only as he serves this higher purpose and makes his desires conform to it. Hegel conceived this higher purpose as the State and taught that man is only free as he serves the State. Karl Marx based his philosophy very largely on that of Hegel. Marxian communism teaches that man is enslaved by capitalism and that man will become free only when private capitalism is abolished. It teaches that the “legal liberty” of Western democracies is merely “formal liberty” without substance.

When Hegel’s view that man is only free when he serves the State was applied to Hitler’s Germany, twentieth century liberals indignantly rejected Hegel’s definition of freedom. But, they implicitly accept his definition when it is applied to the benevolent Welfare State. Furthermore, they accept without reservation the Marxian theory that “liberty under the law” is a hoax and a deception, that it is merely “formal liberty,” and that it lacks real substance. For example, the late Professor John Dewey of Columbia University, who was the leading philosopher of twentieth century liberalism, adopted the Marxian definition of liberty. He said:

The majority who call themselves liberals today are committed to the principle that organized society must use its powers to establish the conditions under which the mass of individuals can possess actual as distinct from merely legal liberty.

The key words of Dewey’s statement are “organized society must use its powers.” If it must use its powers, it must use them in the only way the State can act through compulsion. The State makes laws and enforces them. The penalties for disobedience are fines, imprisonment, and death. The soldier’s bayonet, the policeman’s club, the jailer’s keys, the hangman’s noose—these are the methods by which organized society uses its powers.

Dewey promulgates a charter for broad-scale government control of social and economic life backed by the full coercive powers of the State. That is diametrically opposed to the traditional liberalism of John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

In broad historic perspective, twentieth century liberalism is merely a part of what may properly be termed the Counter Revolution against liberalism. The Liberal Revolution covered about 300 years and represented the revolt of man against authority. The Counter Revolution of Reaction is a world-attempt to turn the clock back. Its purpose is to subordinate man to the State, to reassert authority, and to suppress liberty. Communism, fascism, British socialism, and our own social Welfare State are but different aspects of this Counter Revolution.

The principle of authority is as basic to the Welfare State as it is to the totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia and as it was to Hitler’s Germany. That is why the great threat to our liberties comes not from the communists, but from the liberals. The communists are few and have little influence the Welfare State liberals are many and dominate our society.

Nearly any “liberal” politician in the United States could run on this platform:

” . . . the development of rural electrification”; “financial and other support for agricultural cooperation and for all forms of collective production in the rural districts (cooperative societies, communes, etc.)”; “every encouragement to be given to consumers’ cooperatives”; “the centralization of banking; all nationalized big banks to be subordinated to the central State bank”; “reduction of the working day to seven hours”; “social insurance in all forms (sickness, old age, accident, unemployment, etc.) at State expense”; “comprehensive measures of hygiene; the organization of free medical service”; “the establishment of state organs on the management of industry with provision for the close participation of the trade unions in this work of management.”

The above quotation is not taken from either the Democratic or Republican platform. It was not published as the program of Americans for Democratic Action. It is taken from the Program of the Communist International adopted by the Sixth World Congress, September 1, 1928, at Moscow.