It began with Horace Mann in the early nineteenth century. That is over 175 years ago. He was the man who pushed public education to the forefront of American life, advocating that the state had a responsibility to its citizens to raise of the next generation of citizens. Encyclopedia Brittanica reports that he was “an American educator, the first great American advocate of public education who believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers” (www.britannica.com/biography/Horace-Mann). He achieved what he set out to do, and it has grown since then into the monopoly it is today. I want to unpack the words I underlined in the short biography of Mann.

First of all, he wanted public education rather than the local, parent-led education that had prevailed to that time. There were many good schools operating at the time, teaching reading, English grammar, math, and religious instruction, which was the moral and social fabric of their days. Science had not reached the hallowed peak of reverence it holds today, but children did learn about scientific knowledge through their readings. Mann thought these schools too parochial, too tied to personal and private interests. So he proposed and created a system of education that states could adopt and have the citizens pay for through taxation. Like so many school administrators and educational specialists today, Mann never taught school. He had a poor education himself, he thought, as he was self-taught and found tutors to teach him Latin and Greek. He had no way of knowing if a public education would serve students better, but his theory would prevail and take hold in the minds of the more important theorists and educators of his day. “Mann encountered strong resistance to these ideas—from clergymen who deplored nonsectarian schools, from educators who condemned his pedagogy as subversive of classroom authority, and from politicians who opposed the board as an improper infringement of local educational authority—but his views prevailed” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Mann’s theory rested on a foundation of his understanding of a democratic society. Given that a democracy runs on the principle that the majority rules, his first task was to convince a majority of people that his idea was better than theirs. He set about to do that first in his home state of Massachusetts, and then onto the national stage. He was vehemently opposed to schools run by religious organizations, counting them as having “harsh pedagogy”, which to him meant reinforcing a particular moral code. He was the first to espouse the idea of education as the great equalizer, producing a citizen that he imagined to be like himself. Of course, he saw himself as fair-minded and committed to everyone’s greater good, whether they wanted his brand of good or not.

Mann decided that his brand of education would become universal, which means that all children were to be funneled into the public school system. After all, he did not want some kids to be trained by those dull pedagogues (which means people who taught in traditional ways) whose ideas might run contrary to his “democratic” ideals. Therefore, public school became mandatory wherever it took hold. Ever since then, parents have had to fight hard to keep their kids in alternate or private schools and homeschools and out of the public system. After all, he wanted education to be non-sectarian, which means amoral, not tied to any set of beliefs that might be traditional or orthodox. They would pollute his secular views, which he supposed was what everyone should believe.

Finally, public education was to be reliant on well-trained professional teachers, teachers who would be trained by other professionals in how to think about education. Schools would become utopian models of the democratic ideal espoused by the best thinkers of the day, meaning Mann and his morally superior compatriots. No longer was a mother or father, although themselves literate and smart, capable of providing the truly superior schooling their children needed. Teaching became a profession, and with it, all the dogma and wisdom of the supposedly higher thinkers of the country. It is now generally accepeted that unless one has a teaching degree, one is not capable of teaching school. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If any of this sounds eerily similar to what we have in modern schooling, you would be correct. After Horace Mann, a long list of public advocates for better education have written laws and curricula for the unwitting and apparently unintelligent masses. In order to make their own marks on the progress of humanity through their wisdom, they have espoused some of the craziest theories, many of which were quietly introduced without any input from the parents, grandparents, or the public at all. It may be called “public” education, but the public are only consumers of their product, without any influence upon it.

This is why I have called it the Greatest Divorce. Parents do not have a say in what goes on in the classrooms. They are effectively kept out of helping prepare any part of the curriculum that is fed to their children every day. Parents hand their children over to well-trained professional teachers without the slightest idea of what those teachers believe or what those teachers will teach their kids. If a parent finds out that the teacher is providing material contrary to the beliefs of the parent, that parent is labeled as uncooperative, backward, not socially aware of what the correct ideology requires, and ignorant. After all, the government knows better than parents what children need to learn. The government quietly divorced the kids from the parents in their schools, and they have been doing it for 175 years, at younger and younger ages. Most parents now think it is perfectly acceptable to hand their 3-year-old over to an unknown teacher just because she has been professionally trained.

I certainly am not criticizing the parents. Like fish don’t know that they need water to live, our society believes we need public schools to survive. We have all grown up with the firm belief that public education is in the best interests of the populace. I was a believer for a long time. Then I had children.

I blithely believed that my kids would learn to read because I had learned to read. My oldest daughter learned by the whole language method, something I had never heard of. She did not know how to sound out new words, and when she did not know a word, she would choose a word out of her head that was similar, even if it didn’t make sense. After Grade 1 was done, my son could not read at all. He could not read “cat”. I was forced to put him into a school where they tested him and told me he would have to learn to read before continuing. He repeated Grade 1, and thankfully, he learned very quickly.

I became a teacher in that school, and I began to see the effects on children who had been uneducated in the public school system. I learned that IEPs were invented to help students do less in school rather than providing them with opportunities to learn what they had missed. I learned that students were no longer allowed to repeat a grade to become more capable of succeeding in the next grade. I learned that the experience of whole language had turned out so many non-readers that there was a boom in learning disability diagnoses, particularly dyslexia. I became a tutor specializing in remedial reading. When I tried to tell parents that their children needed special tutoring to help them learn, parents told me that the teachers discouraged tutoring. They had been told that the student would be fine, eventually learning to read and spell, and do math, etc. Some parents got angry with me for suggesting that the public school had failed them. They preferred to believe their child was defective. I learned that the diagnoses provided at the expense of the parents ($1500.00 or more) allowed the school to hire an Education Assistant.

When I started teaching and tutoring at a local university, I learned that the majority of high school graduates were incapable of passing the entrance exams for even the most basic programs. Some of these students went on to become EAs, without ever learning what a child needs to learn to read or do math. In my humble opinion, they became glorified babysitters with a one-year certificate. I also learned that the teacher education curriculum from the University of British Columbia had absolutely no teaching on how to deliver a lesson to 20+ students in a diverse classroom with many who cannot read, some with severe disabilities, and some who were bored to tears.

If this post shocks you, it should. We have all been fed a propaganda so large and pervasive that it has become a sacrilege to criticize it. I tried for a long time to stay positive about public schools, but the theories applied to learning and the secrecy with which the administrators and idealogues act has convinced me to speak up. Education should be open to the scrutiny of the parents whose children are being taught. Controversial experiments on our kids should not take place. They have made parents and students captive to their “public” system, a system closed to the public and to parents in particular.