Compulsory Education 1870

Mises.org is currently emailing ads for EG West's Education and the State (1965). The email says,West explores the views on education of the nineteenth-century British reformers and classical economists who argued for state education. He demonstrates that by the Foster Act of 1870 the state system of education was superimposed upon successful private efforts, thereby suppressing an emerging and increasingly robust structure of private, voluntary, and competitive education funded by families, churches, and philanthropies.Good. Now Mises.org would catch us up with advanced education consciousness in 1965.

Mises.org is connected with LewRockwell.com. The latter published an article on Ivan Illich several years ago. That could have brought education consciousness in line with 1970 (but only early 1970, because it showed no awareness of what then happened in the rest of 1970, during and after the publication of Illich on the subject. And when I alerted them to their omission, they remained silent!) (Other good articles had appeared in the meantime: 1965 to 1970: Lauter & Howe's reverse engineering of "school's purpose. For example: the schools are commonly seen to fail in advancing literacy, numeracy: maybe, the author's hypothesized, advancing literacy and numeracy are not the real purpose of the schools: the schools succeed totally in making the majority of the children tractable morons who show up more or less on time and do what they're told: perfect fodder for industrial domination. Thus, the schools do not fail; they succeed: only too well.)

But neither Mises.org nor LewRockwell.com have reported on the further work of the deschoolers: Illich followers: me, pk, for example. Illich suggested cybernetic data basing at the community level as a way around state dominance of secular rituals. I pk offered the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in New York City. Similarly starting would be learning networks wrote me from all around the world asking for my advice. So too did state educational institutions. I answered them all: repeating Illich's basic points:
Llist resources.
Match interests.
Publish feedback.andDon't tolerate state-coercive ritual
Don't tolerate substitution of certificates for skill testing.I also encouraged these early learning networks to share resources. Thus, in that latter feature, I, even more than Ivan Illich (while standing on his shoulders) invented the internet. Illich invented social networking as a defense against state dominance of potentially free people: I proposed that digital public records be coordinated. I'd already spun a short story in the 1960s which had modeled an internet, and in 1969 offered for publication a short story in which banks had internet'd credit through modems, satellites, and voice recognition software.

I offer my own history as evidence that the practice of sabotaging reformers and burying evidence is alive and well: the most liberal institutions following suit along with the most repressive.

My AgainstHierarchy.org got censored by the US after they arrested me: my nearly three thousand other internet publications got eclipsed: my IS provider destroyed all my data in the wake of the court order to proscribe one section of one domain. My son rescued my data, the FBI having confiscated my equipment, but he didn't remount it. He kept Catfarmer.com alive, but not Knatz.com, not InfoAll.org, not Macroinformation.org.

Research this. You won't find the truth in the records of any university that I'm aware of. I doubt you'll find much in the Library of Congress. Though while alive I could show anyone who visited me proof galore from my records. (I'd said online I had proof. The FBI arrested me, went through my stuff: and left much of my evidence unmolested! The repressors will never have intelligence robots, not so long as they use humans.)

(Tell a dumb crook about fingerprints, and maybe he'll go back to the crime scene and destroy everything except the fingerprints!)

An English Illich fan posted an article on Illich more than a decade ago. He said, "We should read the deschoolers." But I see no evidence that he's even aware of who the deschoolers are. I see no evidence that he even know who I am! He doesn't mention contracting Denis Detzel, founder of the Evanston Learning Exchange. Denis, according to Illich, was talking deschooling even before I was!

Deschooling Society came out in 1970. It was a best seller. My Free Learning Exchange, Inc., Denis' Evanston Learning Exchange, started in 1970, mine only a week or two ahead of his. My deschooling writing has not been published, except by me, mailing it around the world, posting in online since 1995. I'd written voluminously to those teaching colleges which had contacted me. Was anything I wrote read by anyone who could read?

I have no evidence: then or now.

Dozens of people volunteered to help me. They must have understood something? Where are they now? We're further in the dark in 2010 than we were in 1970!

By the way, that Mises.org mailing also touted a related book by Albert Jay Nock: The Theory of Education in the United States (1931). I wish I could afford to buy either of them.