What the ‘Government Schools’ Critics Really Mean
By KATHERINE STEWARTJULY 31, 2017
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — When President Trump recently proposed his budget for “school choice,” which would cut more than $9 billion in overall education spending but put more resources into charter schools and voucher programs, he promised to take a sledgehammer to what he has called “failing government schools.”
That is harsh language for the places most of us call public schools, and where nearly 90 percent of American children get their education.
Accordingly, right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Heartland Institute and the Acton Institute have in recent years published screeds denouncing “the command and control mentality” of “government schools”
that are “prisons for poor children.” All of these have received major funding from the family of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, either directly or via a donor group.
The libertarian tradition is indebted, above all, to the Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who published a hugely influential 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” A true believer in the power of free markets to solve all of humanity’s problems, Friedman argued
that “government schools” are intrinsically inefficient and unjustified.
An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God —
and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.
His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued
that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”
These were not merely abstract academic debates.
Drawing heavily on donations from oil, chemical and automotive tycoons, Fifield was a founder of a conservative free-market organization, Spiritual Mobilization,
that brought together right-wing economists and conservative religious voices — created a template for conservative think tanks.
