Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994); 128 pages; $22.95 hardcover; $14.95 softcover.
Yes, that’s School & State in the title, not Church & State . Richman pulled his oldest child out of public school and has since seen to all his children’s home schooling, or, as he prefers to call it, unschooling . Here he sounds with new vigor the alarm for an old cause — divorcing education and political power. That cause maintains that public schools are coercively financed and administered, regard children as property of the state, undermine parental love and authority, and contradict the entrepreneurial spirit most conducive to economic and social freedom. Richman reargues these positions in the light of the present U.S. predicament, in the process providing, in two chapters worth the book’s price, historical summaries of both the proponents and the opponents of public schooling from the late eighteenth century to the present. He concludes with criticism of such current proposed reforms as charter schools and vouchers and with envisioning the benefits of a free market in education and education without schools. This is educational polemics at their most bracing.
This review appeared in the November 1, 1994, issue of Booklist , 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611. Reprinted by permission.