Drugs and Schooling: The Meaning of State Education

The government set up its own schools to accomplish something that the flourishing private-school market wouldn’t do: indoctrinate children into pliant subjects of the state — future taxpayers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and industrial workers. As education historian Ellwood Cubberly wrote approvingly in 1919,
Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand.

Or as the 19th-century sociologist Edward Ross said, the job of schools is to gather
little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and [shape] them on the social kneadingboard.

Or as the U.S. Bureau of Education put it in 1914,
The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the State rather than for the benefit of the individual.

That’s why “socialization” has always been the first objective of government school systems. Academic subjects were a distant second. “Socialization” has two meanings. The benign sense denotes teaching children social skills so they can get along with others at work and play. The malign sense means instilling collectivism in children so they will see themselves not as autonomous individuals, but rather as more or less identical worker bees serving the Nation.