Creating Prosperity and Freedom for future generations in South Africa
Together with supporting individual liberty in general, South Africans should provide an environment that will encourage the growth of a robust and peaceful society. To achieve such an aim from which everyone will benefit, the policies formulated and adopted by the governing party would have to have the support of the majority of the country’s citizens. Those who elect future members of Parliament should endeavour to select individuals who recognise that the welfare of the entire nation rests upon their support of liberty.
Albert Einstein and the Education of Children
Einstein was highly critical of the education of the children of his day. He said, “Most notably, such an important responsibility rests most heavily on whoever has a binding duty to set an example to those they choose to lead.” He used children’s education as an example of how not to attempt to improve an aspect of everyday life. A multiplicity of human activities can be improved by applying the “Einstein” test. Where representatives of governments are elected to guide their fellows or members of their nation, it is important that the voters satisfy themselves that the individuals they are electing for important roles in government activities have fundamentally sound knowledge of the laws and governance principles that they are required to uphold.
In commenting on a suitable environment for children to be reared in, Einstein said: “It is in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mostly in need of freedom; without this, it goes to ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of a sense of duty.”
Compulsory schooling laws are not benign. They prevent the development of alternative educational opportunities and deprive parents and their children, by force, of what should be their right alone; which is parental control over children’s education. The original intention of the laws was merely to ensure that no child would be deprived of a basic education because of parental neglect. There was no plan for the state to deliver schooling or prescribe its content and method of delivery, in minute detail. It was not always so, yet you find that compulsory schooling is almost universal. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century the United Kingdom and the United States, breeding grounds of the Industrial Revolution, did not have compulsory schooling. We find that in the absence of compulsory schooling laws, the literacy rates of those countries were at least as high as they are now.
Murray Rothbard described compulsory schooling as an “obviously harmful imposition on parents” and criticised Martin Luther for the fact that Calvinist Puritans took compulsion to America, and Dutch and French Huguenots brought compulsory religious school attendance to South Africa.
How did compulsory schooling, the obviously harmful imposition upon parents and their children, come to be initiated in the first place? In his work on the topic, economist and historian, Murray Rothbard informs us that compulsory schooling in the modern world began with the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, in a famous letter to the German rulers in 1524, urged them to establish public schools. The first public school was established in the German state of Gotha in 1524 and others soon followed. As ruler of Geneva in the mid-sixteenth century, John Calvin established government schools in the city. Under his influence, Holland adopted compulsory government schooling early in the seventeenth century. The primary objective of the originators of compulsory schooling was inculcation of their religion. In Calvin’s case, it was obedience to the government. Calvinist Puritans took the idea with them to America, and Dutch and French Huguenots brought it to South Africa.
Governments as Service Providers
Governments as service providers have a unique ability: they can make time stand still. Whatever they take over defies change for decades or even centuries. Postal services, schools, and in some countries, railways and telecommunications are prime examples. Because of their power to prohibit others from competing with them, they can prevent and retard change, freezing the evolution of functions at whatever juncture they take control.
Schools, therefore, function very much as they did a century ago, trapped in legislation and regulations that prevent meaningful change from occurring. Young people find themselves locked in this quaint schooling environment in which progress is retarded while the rest of the world moves on. If students are astute, they keep in touch with the most important world developments in their own free time, as they did when they embraced the electronic age long before the first computer was installed in a government school. If students do not, of their own accord, keep pace with development, they fall behind and become victims of the chains that bind them.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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