Education

Resolving the School Prayer Conflict

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1995

The controversy about school prayer threatens to aggravate the already intense dispute over the role of public schools in America. Flush from their midterm election victory, the new Republican congressional majority is talking about launching a constitutional amendment to reverse the 30-year-old Supreme Court ruling barring formal prayer in ...

Book Review: Separating School and State

by Ray Olson November 1, 1994

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, ...

Freedom of Education

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1993

What if, one hundred years ago, the American people had decided to amend the Constitution to provide a system of public churches in towns across America. Imagine the following conversation in 1993: Advocate of Religious Freedom: We have a terrible problem with the public-church system. It was a big mistake to set up public churching in America a hundred years ...

Freeing the Education Market

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1993

Many a profound word is spoken unwittingly. Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office once issued a paper stating that the literacy rate in Massachusetts has never been as high as it was before compulsory schooling was instituted. Before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to force ...

Are Compulsory School Attendance Laws Necessary? Part 3

by Samuel L. Blumenfeld May 1, 1991

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Today the law is not being used to force delinquents and truants into the schools, but to harass and regulate home schoolers and fundamentalist Christian schools. In the 1800s it was assumed that if you attended a public school you learned to read and write. Today, no such assumption can ...

Why Not Separate School and State?

by Leonard Read April 1, 1991

Government "education" includes three forms of coercion: (1) compulsory attendance, (2) government dictated curricula, and (3) the forcible collection of the wherewithal to pay the enormous bill.... The results of force are bad enough as related to the pocket-book, but they are far worse as they ...

Are Compulsory School Attendance Laws Necessary? Part 2

by Samuel L. Blumenfeld April 1, 1991

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Both the Unitarians and the liberal Protestants began to view the public schools and compulsory attendance as the most effective means of maintaining the Protestant character of American culture in the face of massive Catholic immigration. The fact that the Irish were poor and unschooled did not endear them to the ...

Politically Correct Thinking and State Education

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1991

You may recall seeing the December 24, 1990, issue of Newsweek on the newsstands. The cover had a granite wall with raised lettering, spelling out the words, "Thought Police." If you read the article, you learned about something called "politically correct thinking." A growing number of institutions of higher learning ...

Why Americans Won’t Choose Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1991

All across the land there is an unusual stirring among the American populace. The American people are sensing that something is severely wrong in our nation. They see the ever-increasing taxation, regulation, bureaucracies, and police intrusions. And they are gradually discovering that, despite their right to vote, they have ...

Are Compulsory School Attendance Laws Necessary? Part 1

by Samuel L. Blumenfeld March 1, 1991

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 It is assumed by the vast majority of Americans that the issue of compulsory school attendance is a settled matter, part and parcel of every civilized nation-state, and a prerequisite of a democratic society. We all acknowledge that a representative form of government requires an educated electorate for its survival. But ...