Karl Marx was a visionary, but his vision was not based on objective reality. Your author, the eminent and all-knowing Rob Smith—soothsaying sage and cosmic psychic—is also a visionary. His vision for a better future is the essence of objective reality because it is grounded in historical fact.
Cui bono? Every public policy—indeed, every worn-out government program or institution that shouldn’t exist but still does—exists not based on natural order, but on who benefits. Your government, no matter where you live, mandates that it takes control of your five-year-old for thirteen years, where you and the child become slaves to the government-run school leviathan. From sunup to considerably past sundown, someone or something else—a faceless 1984-style institution—controls your household. Does this sound like liberty to you? The long arm of the state reaches into your home to raise your child for you? Is this why the shot heard at the Old North Bridge was fired?
Here in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger is running for governor. She’s adamantly against school choice. Against parental wishes, she advocates for eighteen-year-old boys to flash their dongs in front of and shower with twelve-year-old girls in public schools. Parents have no choice if 225-pound boys want to compete against their daughters on the field hockey team. Insane, right? According to Abigail, teachers can groom eight-year-olds into believing they are another sex, and parents have no right of intervention.
Cui bono from this insanity? The Education Industrial Complex!
We are all products of our upbringing. I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia, where 250 years ago lived perhaps the greatest concentration of intellectual prowess in the past millennium. Besides the Founding Fathers we all know, there were many men of extraordinary brilliance and erudition. There were no real cities—mostly just courthouse villages. No public schools, and no schools of the type we know today. No public libraries. No electric lights. No internet. No paved roads. No cars. Yet these men were translating Greek and Latin at eleven and reading all the great literature, histories, and philosophies from the classical era. They were well grounded in mechanical and natural philosophy (math and science), not to mention practical knowledge—real skills such as surveying, navigation, and agriculture. And of course, the tenets of Judeo-Christianity were a fundamental part of their upbringing. They acquired all this learning in half the time today’s students spend graduating from high school—only to end up being functionally illiterate.
Thus, I can say with great confidence that government-run schools should and can be abolished. I’ve often said that to be truly learned, one merely needs to read great books and talk to smart people. These eighteenth-century Virginians did not sit around the idiot tube after supper watching The Simpsons and eating Doritos. They read, by candlelight. They traded and discussed books among their neighbors, and often entertainment centered around polite parlor activities—readings, poetry, music, and various games that engaged the intellect. Killjoys they weren’t; dances, horse racing, and blood sports were prominent elements in their upbringing.
Recently, I’ve been reading John Taylor of Caroline. He grew up and lived just down the Rappahannock River from my family’s place. I’m absolutely in awe. A true Cincinnatus, he has been referred to as America’s version of Romanitas. When martial duty called, he picked up his musket. When civic matters demanded attention, he dutifully went to Richmond or Washington. A prolific writer, he authored multiple books and pamphlets on the Constitution, the nature of man, limited government, the tyranny of government created factions, and the virtues that instill good citizenship. Some credit him as being America’s greatest political theorist. I never knew of him, though I’ve passed through the sleepy village of Bowling Green in Caroline County a thousand times—and now I marvel. Wow. Long ago, in this agrarian landscape, the presiding culture produced such great men of intellect, wisdom, cultivation, and honorable character. Why? How did this happen? How could it happen?
Mr. Rob Is Right will tell you why.
They had no one to rely on but themselves. Cui bono? They exclusively benefited—and did not have to share their education with a plethora of teachers’ unions, state bureaucrats, money-grubbing blowhard politicians, accrediting agencies, and an army of not-very-bright or engaging teachers and administrators. Yes, I said it—most public-school teachers are dull, empty vessels and nowhere near as beneficial to learning as a 1750 fourteen-year-old having a hard cider or syllabub at the local courthouse tavern with enlightened men engaged in the practical matters of the world.
I know what you’re thinking: “Smith, you are a radical nut.” Perhaps—but I’m an unencumbered man of the practical world, and unlike those totally vested in institutions created by government (what Taylor called the “paper aristocracy”), I am free of such entanglements. I never understood Jefferson’s fascination with an agrarian republic of small farmers until I read Taylor last week. The pernicious tendency of all governments is to bestow favors on protected factions, which leads to great corruption at the expense of the self-reliant productive class. Taylor brilliantly compares the self-reliant farmer—who is a good steward of his labor and assets—as one who has developed and honed the special skills and character to be a good and virtuous citizen. He reminds us that “the less government can do, the less tumult it will produce,” and that a government’s “power to give is the power to take.” Those who flee to monarchy (a powerful central state) do so to form factions that practice “mendacious or ideological” schemes “under the title of patriots,” and are like “fanaticks under the title of saints, ready to perpetrate any crimes to gratify their interest or prejudice.” There is hardly a more mendacious paper aristocracy than the Education Industrial Complex, nor more fanatical than its leaders, like Randi Weingarten—Abigail Spanberger’s ideological doppelgänger.
Taylor, being close to the soil, also knew the self-reliant man and stated that republics survive through men who are willing to assume responsibility and do so in their day-to-day practical lives. Such activity develops a “wholesome spirit.” When I read this, I screamed out loud enough for my neighbors to hear—YES! He reminded his readers that it was citizen-soldiers who defended Rome during the Punic Wars, and once duty was done, they returned to their practical, self-reliant labors.
Drawing from Taylor’s ancient wisdom, your author suggests that government funding of education only benefits the education establishment at the expense of the self-reliant, from whom it receives its grandiose resources. It is an abject failure. It suffers from “ideological schemes” and “mendacious policies” that serve its own needs—exactly what Taylor described as the “paper aristocracy.”
Taylor understood, as your author has always proclaimed, that people aren’t as incapable of helping themselves as our elites want them to be. Take away the government money and its favored factions that receive its benevolence, and people will become self-reliant, develop Taylor’s “wholesome spirit,” and educate children in much the same way it was done 275 years ago. It worked marvelously then (objective reality), and with today’s tools, it is one hundred times easier to learn than in 1750.
Last week, I was reading a weighty book (at least for me, a reprobative heathen) on the Old Testament—filled with Greek and Hebrew definitions and place names. I pondered much of what I read, which led to questions and ancillary thoughts. I had my AI app on my phone. It was miraculous—as though I had a dozen Middle East experts on ancient civilizations at my disposal to shed light on my learning.
Cut the cord. Unbind the chains. The industry and ingenuity of the self-reliant will create a much better education system—one that might even mirror that of eighteenth-century Tidewater, Virginia.
