Journdo/Likr~arrnnSludnr.Vol. 2, No.4, pp 157 -372 B amo on Prnr ad. 1978. Printed in meat Britain. ANARCHY REVISITED: AN INQUIRY INTO THE PUBLIC EDUCATION DILEMMA* ROBERT H. CHAPPELL ProJessional Teacher Program, University of Maine Public schooling has become a prodigious cases religion, only served to warp the natural bureaucratic institution that operates as a goodness and wisdom that is the essence of man rigorous maintenance system. Its function is to and mankind. Consequently, significant educa- inculcate the masses with acceptable ideologies tional change must express the natural sen- and to weed out dissenters whose recalcitrant timents of an unstructured mass who, through behavior and spontaneity are viewed as the association and utilization of intellectual dangerous to the democratic tenets of the communes and cooperatives will arrive at a new United States. As compulsory attendance laws synthesis - a new direction for American surfaced and were enacted, the educational education. monolith became ever more securely entrench- This paper will be primarily concerned with ed in American society. Public education has identification and documentation of the educa- become a breakwater interrupting the dynamics tional viewpoints espoused by the European of inquiry, dissent and innovation which are anarchists of the nineteenth century. A second essential to democracy and to the human condi- section will highlight the ideas of two of the tion. prominent contemporary opponents of public In light of the above it seems timely to schooling, Ivan Illich and the late Paul Good- reevaluate the historical critiques of public man. Following this, a third section will at- education that apparently have largely been ig- tempt to depict the commonalities between the nored, misinterpreted and misconstrued. A European precursors and the contemporary revitalization and reexamination of the major "deschoolers". criticisms of the 19th and 20th century anar- William Godwin (1756- 1836) is considered chists could provide a catalyst which might to be the first European to develop a com- revitalize the arrested development of prehensive anarchistic critique in his Enquiry American education and life. Concerning Political Justice (1793). His blatant The major anarchist critics of education, attack on government, which he viewed as an William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre- unnecessary evil that should be introduced as Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Francisco sparingly as possible, and his belief in man's Ferrer, Leo Tolstoy and Max Stirner, all believ- capacity to develop his intellect independently, ed to varying degrees that man was essentially a were to form the foundations of the anarchistic benign creature with a potential for goodness. tradition.[" His ideal society was egalitarian However, they suggested that the habits and in- and completely anarchistic, but his abhorrence stitutions of authority manifested in of violence precluded revolution as a means to economics, politics, education, and in some this end. Godwin tolerated the idea of a loosely *The original version of this article was prepared for the knit democracy as a transitory phase evolving Summer Research Seminar on the Opponents of Public into an ultimately stateless society. Schooling, held in New York City, June- August 1977, and sponsored by the Center for Independent Education and Godwin's opposition to a system of national the Center for Libertarian Studies. education was based upon a maxim of the ROBERT H. CHAPPELL Enlightenment - social progress could only ing in these technical aspects of law would be come about through the development and ap- superfluous within a proper condition of society. plication of human reason. Godwin believed Because this condition of society was an ideal that human reason and individuality were anti- and not yet a reality, Godwin conceded a thetical to a state controlled educational limited role of social control to the government. system which would serve to bolster the power in his ongoing argument against natianal of the political machinery of the state. education, he declared, in the second edition of . the project of a national education ought Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796), uniformly to be discouraged on account of its obvious alliance with national government. This is an alliance It is not the business of government . .to become the of a more formidable nature than the old and much preceptor of its subjects. Its office is not to inspire our contested alliance of church and state. Before we put virtues, that would be a hopeless task; it is merely to so powerful a machine under the direction of so am- check these excesses, which threaten the general securi- biguous an agent, it behooves us to consider well what ty."' it is that we do. Government will not fail to employ it, Godwin was not inclined to deny the urgent to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.[" need to improve literacy and to develop a wider and a deeper culture in society. He felt that this Godwin also dismissed the possibility of the could be accomplished through the use of participation of the church in education. The literature[B' and through voluntary discussion church wasan antiquated and dogmatic institu- groups led by cadres of the enlightened which tion that indoctrinated the masses with ideas would disperse knowledge by educating an ever that were static and restrictive. increasing number ot people. Needless to say, . even in the petty institutions of Sunday Schools, the Government and the Church would have no the chief lessons that are taught are a superstitious veneration for the Church of England, and to bow to part in this voluntary undertaking.['' every man in a handsome coat. All this is directly con- Godwin detected an inherent problem in his trary to the true interests of mankind. All this must be informal and voluntary system of education. unlearned before they begin to be wise."' He pointed out that it would be difficult to find Godwin's understanding of the Sunday a substantial number of enlightened teachers Schools' role in education is worth noting. In for most had been indoctrinated by the Burton Pollin's thesis, Education and Enlight- teachings of Church and State. Apart from a enment in the Works of William Godwin, the small group of friends who shared his educa- author indicates that there is room to believe tional views (Thomas Holcroft, a liberal that the English Sunday Schools, set up by novelist and playwright; David WilIiams, a Roger Raikes of Gloucester in 1780, were in- spokesman for advanced educational views in tended to imbue poor children with a sense of Lectures on Education, and a handful of discipline through religious and elementary othersP1),the vast majority of pedagogues were education. After the development of the Sun- imbued with a sense of servility to the state, in day School unions (1785), these schools were Godwin's opinion. It should be noted that God- widely regarded as institutions of social control win did make some limited concessions to that did not in any way limit the cheap supply public education in his essay of "Of Public and of child labour."l Private Education" in The Enquirer; Reflec- Godwin's intense polemic against the pro- tions on Education, Manners, and Literature ponents of national education (e.g. George (1797).'0' These concessions on the advantage Dryer, Mary Hayes, Thomas Paine, Edmund of the socializing aspects of public schooling as Burke) dismissed the argument that a national opposed to private education, could have been system could be defended as supplying the prompted by Godwin's realization that the citizen with a rudimentary appreciation of the enlightened teacher was an endangered species. law. Godwin believed that just law was self- It is more likely that his partial acknowledge- evident to the rational man and could be diff- ment of public education was due to the public ferentiated from the technical law manufac- opinion of the time (1797). Because of the tured and interpreted by the courts. The train- dismal failure of the French Revolution, which ANARCHY REVISITED: AN INQUIRY INTO THE PUBLIC EDUCATION DILEMMA 359 had resulted in autocratic rule by a vicious authority and indoctrination. oligarchy, most of the antigovernment lust as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the literature espousing individual freedom was belief of the church ...without ever throwing a doubt considered by many to be insidious. In upon this belief; as authors fi whole folios on the State without calling in question the fiidea of the February, 1793, An Enquiry Concerning State itself, as our newspapers are crammed with Political Justice was considered by many to be politics because they are conjured into the fancy that a major philosophical treatise worthy of praise. man was created to be a zwn politician -so also sub- jecu vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, But by the end of the Terror in 1794 and cer- liberals in humanity, without ever putting these rued tainly by 1797, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ideas of theirs to the searching knife of criticism. Un- dislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those great majority of the English intellectual com- thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts munity had ttirned against both the revolution them - lays hands on the sacred."" and Godwin's anarchism. Stirner's central argument was the ownership Godwin's partial acknowledgement of public of self which can be described as absolute in- education could also have arisen from the in- dividuality. To Stirner, liberal humanism was fluence of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft whom as dangerous as any form of government for it he met in 1791 and married in March of had become the church of the secular age and 1797.['01Mary Wollstonecraft was a proponent therefore suppressed individual initiative and of free government coeducation, the central freedom of will. Stirner's critique of education idea of her major work, A Vindication of the follows suit.