From Isabel Paterson (1886-1961), Canadian-American journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and literary critic of her day, The God of the Machine (1943):
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
There must be separation of education and State for the same reasons as there must be separation of church and State. Failure to do so assures an education system that teaches orthodox catechism. while at the same time assuring that it eradicates heresy,
“If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.”
-Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
Larken Rose, in
The Most Dangerous Superstition [pdf]:
The purported purpose of schools is to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic fields of thought. But the message that institutions of “education” actually teach, far more effectively than any useful knowledge or skills, is the idea that subservience and blind obedience to “authority” are virtues.
. . .
In the classroom setting, the “authority” can change the rules at will, can punish the entire group for what one student does, and can question or search any student – or all students – at any time. The “authority” is never seen as having any obligation to justify or explain to the students the rules it makes, or anything else it does. And it is of no concern to “authority” whether a student has a good reason to think that his time would be better spent being somewhere else, doing something else, or thinking about something else. The “grades” the student receives, the way he is treated, the signals he is sent – written, verbal, and otherwise – all depend upon one factor: his ability and willingness to unquestioningly subvert his own desires, judgment and decisions to those of “authority.” If he does that, he is deemed “good.” If he does not, he is deemed “bad.”
This method of indoctrination was not accidental. Schooling in the United States, and in fact in much of the world, was deliberately modeled after the Prussian system of “education,” which was designed with the express purpose of training people to be obedient tools of the ruling class, easy to manage and quick to unthinkingly obey, especially for military purposes. As it was explained by Johann Fichte, one of the designers of the Prussian system, the goal of this method was to “fashion” the student in such a way that he “simply cannot will otherwise” than what those in “authority” want him to will. At the time, the system was openly admitted to be a means of psychologically enslaving the general populace to the will of the ruling class. And it continues to accomplish exactly that, all over the world, including in the United States. [emphasis in original]