The last two essays in this series on government education examined the origin and history of State-run schooling in the United States. In “Why Government Schooling Came to America,” we saw how nineteenth-century American intellectuals and politicians used the reactionary Prussian model of government schooling as a prototype for educating America’s children. And then in “When Bolshevik Schooling Came to America,” we further saw how twentieth-century Progressive-socialist intellectuals were influenced and inspired by the communist model of education implemented by the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.
These two different models of education shared one important objective: to educate children by and for the State. This is an indisputable fact demonstrated in these essays by an abundance of historical evidence. (Note to readers: by the “State” I mean any form of government that exceeds the legitimate powers, purposes, and functions of a rights-respecting government.)
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