The Discovery of Freedom

Rose Wilder Lane is both the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the author of the fantastic book, The Discovery of Freedom (available for purchase or download at Mises.org).

Consider this excerpt beginning on page 259:

This American method of education never fully developed; it was stopped about forty years ago, by the eager Germanminded reformers, who believed that the State can spend an American's money for his, or his children's, education, much more wisely than he can. American schooling is now compulsory, enforced by the police and controlled by the State (that is, by the politicians in office) and paid for by compulsory taxes.

The inevitable result is to postpone a child's growing-up. He passes from the authority of his parents to the authority of the police. He has no control of his time and no responsibility for its use until he is sixteen years old. His actual situation does not require him to develop self-reliance, self-discipline and responsibility; that is, he has no actual experience of freedom in his youth.

This is ideal education for the German State, whose subjects are not expected ever to know freedom. The discipline in German schools is strict; it tends to train the young into the obedient submission that men in German Government demand
from their subjects.

But it does not work that way in this country, because American educators naturally try to compensate for the counterrevolutionary compulsion in this school system. They do not subject American children to rigid German discipline. On the
contrary, they try to make schools so enjoyable that the children will not realize that the police compel them to be there.(But the children know it.) The teachers try to make learning easy, a game. But real learning is not easy; it requires selfdiscipline and hard work. The attempt to make learning effortless actually keeps a child from discovering the pleasure of self-discipline and of the mental effort that overcomes difficulties and does a thoroughly good job.

This is cruel treatment of the new generations of Americans who must come out of this compulsory and yet too softly pampering schooling to face the realities of a world in which human beings are free and living is not easy. And it is not
the best preparation for inheriting the leadership of the World Revolution for freedom.

Now, consider that Lane wrote this in 1943, 64 years ago. What was true then, is more so today. My other favorite quote (found on page 185) from this wonderful book is:

And let no one imagine that tender sympathy for the poor inspires this attack. These men and women who weep for Americans who own so much less than the rich (and so much more than the poor ever owned in history before) are proposing to take away from them and their children the right ever to own any property.

I could continue with other insightful tidbits, but I would simply end up reproducing the book in full. Buy it, or download it, and read wisdom from The Little House on the Prairie: the second generation.