LETTERS 1/18

Public schools and freedom

Let me first thank the Colorado Daily for interviewing the Colorado Libertarian Party's gubernatorial candidates, Ralph Shnelvar and James Vance (Jan 16). However, I disagree with Mr. Vance's distinction between "fundamentalist" and "realist" libertarians. The Libertarian Party has always distinguished itself as being the Party of Principle. Simply stated, this is the ethical principle at all human relationships should be voluntary. When it comes to politics, Libertarians advocate a civil society, not a political society. Their maxim is: Ask not what your country can force other people to do for you. Period.

John Locke wrote that people should not delegate to government the power to do anything that would be unlawful for them to do themselves. He'd be upset with today's America. Most people have no problem asking their representative to force their neighbors to fund charities they deem important. That's robbery. But how do we get from today's divisive political society of compassion-by-compulsion to a civil society of mutual respect and genuine compassion?

Among people who share libertarian principles, there is a place for discussing strategies to achieve this goal. But if Mr. Vance truly regards "public" schools as integral to American culture because of their historical roots, he has revealed his ignorance of both American culture and education. "Public" schools exist for the benefit of government, not the public, and should be called "government schools."

The heart of American culture is individualism: moral right of the individual to live for himself. Yet the purpose of government run schooling in America, and all over the world, has been to teach children that their lives belong, not to themselves, but to the State. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and advocate of government schools wrote: "Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it."

Not much has changed. As George Land and Beth Jarman write in Breaking Point and Beyond: "As late as October 1989, the Association of California School Administrators announced, 'The purpose of the school system is not to provide students with an education.' Individual education is 'a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order.' Here the leaders of one of the largest school systems in the world have declared that students can enter the twenty-first century supported by schools that do not have education as their central purpose?"

If James Vance wants to preserve this kind of "education", he should admit that he is not a libertarian in any sense of the word.

Brian Schwartz

Minister of Propaganda, Campus Libertarians at CU