2016 Voter's Guide: Freedom of Education

     In 1926, J. Gresham Machen, a professor of New Testament at Princeton, was asked to give testimony before a congressional committee regarding the formation of a Federal Department of Education.  The bill was an attempt, it was said, to provide better education for the nation by making education more efficient.  Dr. Machen was more than troubled.
      In his opening, Dr. Machen mentioned that there were two reasons one might oppose a bill.  The first was because you didn't think it would do what it set out to do.  The other was that the bill had a evil purpose.  Machen said he opposed the bill for the latter reason.  What could be wrong with streamlining education so that it was more efficient?
     "Uniformity in education under central control it seems to me is the worst fate into which any country can fall,"  he said.  The bill assumed that "children of the state must be educated for the benefit of the State; that idiosyncrasies should be avoided and the State should devise that method of education which will best promote the welfare of the State."  Machen was skillfully pointing out that education's sole goal was not to produce good citizens.  Education served the whole populace so that an educated populace could deliver the nation from temptations to tyranny.
     If good citizenship was not the goal of education, what did Machen see?  He saw education as something radically different:  If you read our history as a nation, "you will discover that our notion has been that parents have a right to educate children as they please; that idiosyncrasies should not be avoided; that the State should prevent one group from tyrannizing over another, and that education is essentially not a matter of the State at all."
     Machen believed in unfettered educational competition.  Let the best ideas win in the public square, whether they are sourced in public, private, or charter schools, or in home schools. He wrote:  "I had a great deal rather have confusion in the sphere of education than intellectual and spiritual death."  The conflict of ideas was important in a democracy.  It is where the best ideas would be generated.  Efficency and uniformity remove the voice of dissent from the public square.  Isn't that where the new ideas come from, whether in science or politics, or religion?
     This fall, vote for the candidate who will reverse the imprisonment of education in uniformity under central control.  Vote for the one whose ideas are open to the full scrutiny of the people.