Breaking the Educational Cartel

Gary North

Every society has rites of passage. If you want to begin to understand any
society, study its rites of passage.

In the Christian West, there are three acknowledged rites of passage:

baptism, marriage, and funeral. Obviously, a funeral is a rite of passage for
the survivors. Nobody wears street clothes — other than a mortician's
street clothes — when he is invited by somebody else to one of these rites of
passage.

Every society has additional rites of passage. There is usually a rite of

passage associated with advancing from childhood to adulthood. I love the
writings of Jean Shepherd, who wrote A Christmas Story. I think his
greatest story was "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories." There, he
established the connection between a tribal rite of passage for young men
with the senior prom.

School Rites vs. Parental Rights

One of the rites of passage that apparently I am the only one who has
recognized is what I call the dorm key ritual. When a parent takes his child
to register in a college dorm, the person at the front desk hands the room
key to the freshman student, not to the parent. The parent is paying for the
room, but the student gets the key. Whether parents recognize this or not,
this is one of the major rites of passage for about a third of the American
population.

A more important rite of passage for most families is this: kindergarten

enrollment. The parent has to take the child to the school to get enrolled.
But this is not the main rite. The main right is the school bus rite. In the
morning of the child's first day of school, the parent takes the child to the
pickup location, and she watches her child climb aboard the school bus,
possibly in tears. I mean both the child and the mother. The yellow school
bus is the agency of the state as surely as the white bus of the prisoner
heading for jail. I wrote about this in 2004. Read my article here.

Why do parents do this? In the United States in the early 19th century,
there was no requirement for parents to send their children to school. Until
after the Civil War, Southerners who wanted their children to get good
educations hired tutors. There were a few colleges, but there weren't many.
The parent was in charge of the selection of the tutor. But only rich families
could afford this. Other families hired tutors through a local civil
government. Attendance wasn't required, except in New England, but the
state was in charge of educating children.

There is nothing inherent about the state's claim on the right to educate
children. It goes back to the bureaucracy of Babylonia, where King
Nebuchadnezzar had a hierarchy of educators who made certain that the
best and the brightest young men who represented the conquered nations
had to be educated. The first chapter of the book of Daniel is about this
system. It had to do with empire.

The Lure of Certification

Why do parents put up with this? Because they want their children to be
certified. They want their children to have access to careers that are
available mainly or only to people who have gone through a formal process
of academic certification. This certification process places the school in
authority over what the children are taught. This transfers authority from
the family to the state.

The parents have no control over the content of the formal education
except in rare circumstances. They don't have any control over the
methodology of instruction, either. They meekly surrender their children
to the educrats.

The American homeschool movement over the last generation has begun
to siphon off maybe 5% of young people. This is a move in the direction of
freedom. Parents are in control over the curriculum materials that they
adopt. This is a transfer of authority back to the families. The families pay
for the education they want for their children.

This control ends at college. That's why the dorm key ritual is important. It
is the symbol of the transfer of authority over the minds of children from
the parents to whoever is in control of the university's curriculum. Because
of regional accreditation and state laws against the use of the word
"college" or "university," the educrats have something approaching a
monopoly over the final years of education. Even homeschool parents turn
their children over to universities at the end of the process. They wash
their hands of responsibility. They surrender. They don't fight any longer.
Churches have not intervened to help parents. There were parochial
schools in Catholic circles in the United States from the middle of the 19th
century until today. But after 1970, bishops began shutting down the
schools. They were expensive to run. The bishops were part of the Vatican
II movement. They began to abandon the idea that they had any real
responsibility over the education of the parishioners. The money was used
for other purposes.

He Who Pays the Piper Listens Meekly

Normally, he who pays the piper calls the tune. This has not been true in
education, especially higher education, since the 12th century. Parents
have paid for the education of their children, but they have not attempted
to control the content of the curriculum.

In the medieval West, the church was officially in charge of higher

education, but it did not exercise much authority. Officially, most
professors were priests. Because he was ordained by the church, a priest
had to be in subjection to the church. But he was really in subjection to the
local college that employed him. The college demanded equal authority
with the church. This was why professors and students wore black robes. It
was to show equality of status. It was to show that the college and
university system had equal authority to the priesthood. Priests also wore
black robes.
The priests and the professors demanded equal authority with the with the
judges of the civil government. The university inserted itself into the
covenantal arrangement of church and state. It demanded a separate legal
jurisdiction. This is why John Wycliffe was able to survive church
pressures. He taught at Oxford. This was how Luther survived the pressure
of the Catholic hierarchy. He had the support of the local prince, whose
money established the University of Württemberg.

An End Run Around the Education Bureaucracy

It is now possible to begin to win back some degree of control over the
content of college education. The educrats have accepted this
institutionally, but parents have not yet figured it out. Neither have
churches, synagogues, and mosques.

There is now a soft underbelly of the university system. This is the system
of examinations known as college credit in high school. There are three
exam systems: CLEP, AP, and DSST. These exams enable children who are
still in high school to take an exam, get scores back, and get credit for
college courses above a specified score. This saves parents at least 40% of
the college bill. If the parents enroll their children in a distance learning
program, the parents don't have to pay for room and board. This can
reduce the college costs by over 90%. Not many parents do it, but it is now
legally possible.

The exams need not involve classroom instruction, although AP courses

are taught on high school campuses. The student never sits under a college
professor, either literally or figuratively. If he can pass the exam, which is
created by a committee and graded by algorithms, he can escape from
college classroom indoctrination.

The exams cover what are considered the basics of a particular academic
discipline. The indoctrination goes on, but it is condensed. It is not
personal. A professor is not lecturing to the students. The impact of
classroom presentations does not manifest itself in the examination
system.
There is now a tremendous possibility available to individuals as well as
churches or other organizations. If they can locate competent teachers who
are capable of using screencast technology to produce instructional videos,
the organization can create a shadow college.

Here's how it works. The video instructor assigns written materials that he
thinks support the worldview of the organization that is putting together
the shadow college. The instructor can then go through a basic textbook in
the field. It can be a used textbook. It does not cost $250. It can be three
editions back and sell for $25. The instructor may assign a CLEP study
guide for the particular course. That could be another $15 purchased used
on Amazon. This guide summarizes the material in the textbook. It focuses
on the questions that are most likely to be asked. It probably includes
practice exams. There is some trace of the ideology governing academic,
but remember this: these tests and guidebooks are screened by
committees. The books are bland. Their arguments must be acceptable to
most of the people in the screening committee. It is indoctrination lite.

The instructor can go through the textbook and show where the
presuppositions are wrong, the facts are wrong, and the interpretation is
wrong. The instructor can inoculate the student against the humanism of
the classroom. He is in control. He structures the lectures. He makes the
reading assignments. He may even have the competence to write a
textbook of his own and offer it in PDF form. Not many college instructors
are willing to do this. They should have been doing this for the last 200
years, but they haven't. But the video instructor can show how the material
that the students need to memorize to answer algorithm-graded exams is
wrongheaded. He can use the textbook to demonstrate the silliness of
whatever it is the textbook is trying to get into the minds of the students.
There is a way for the instructor to protect the student from the textbook.

This is now a technological possibility. This can be done through YouTube.

Parents can assign these courses to their children in homeschool
environments. They will probably have to buy a textbook, but that's about
the only cost associated with the instruction. The instructor online does his
job. The parents can watch the videos if they're really concerned, but I
don't think most of them will. But they can.

Since it costs no money to start a YouTube channel or a WordPress.com

blog, any movement can create its own shadow university today. It can
adopt the curriculum that will enable the students to quiz out of their first
two years of college. The first two years are when the indoctrination really
begins. That's when the instructors and the university undermine the
authority of the parents and the parents' worldview. By the upper division
courses, instructors assume that the screening process has already
accomplished what was intended to accomplish, namely, to separate the
student from the worldview of his parents. The parents have paid for this,
either directly as tuition payers or indirectly as taxpayers. It is suicidal, but
it has been universal for as long as there have been colleges and
universities. It is part of the culture of the West to transfer children to the
control of the educrats.

If churches were not asleep at the wheel, and if ideological groups were not
asleep at the wheel, they would have begun doing what Salman Khan
began doing in 2006. They would have recruited competent instructors to
produce online homeschool courses with about 180 lessons per course,
which can be delivered free of charge to any parent anywhere in the world.

The churches have no vision. They do not perceive that their worldview is
being undermined by the humanist accredited educational establishment.

The churches don't want to get involved in anything controversial and

therefore donation-threatening. Academic disciplines such as sociology,
philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, and virtually all the
other social sciences are highly controversial. The churches don't feel
competent to recruit men who will challenge the reigning ideology of
university education, not even with free YouTube videos. There will be
other university-trained donors and pastors in the denomination who will
scream bloody murder if somebody attempts to reconstruct an academic
discipline in terms of the official creed of the church. These people have
lived in a safe academic environment all of their careers. The church
doesn't question what they teach the students. Psychology professors in
Christian colleges and tax-funded universities teach a version of
Freudianism or Jungianism or behavioralism. None of this is Christian.
None of it is grounded in permanent ethics. All of it undermines the
authority of the family. All of it undermines the authority of the church.
But the church does nothing. It has done nothing for 200 years.

Adapted from a longer version of this article.

Gary North is the author of Mises on Money; Honest Money: The Biblical
Blueprint for Money and Banking; and Gertrude Coogan's Bluff:
Greenback Populism as Conservative Economics. He is also the author of
a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.