COMMENTARY: Do You Trust the Government with Your Kid?

Education is an inherently values-oriented endeavor. You look at your kids and say, “I want them to be virtuous, happy, clear-minded adults, capable of overcoming the intellectual, social, and moral problems they face.” Then you look at the resources you have and decide how to reach that end-goal. You give them exercise in mind and body; you guide them away from that which would truly harm them (Heb. 12:5-6), provide that which brings flourishing (Matt. 7:9), and train them to overcome progressively greater challenges (Prov. 13:1), learning new skills and discovering how their talents can best be put to use, (both of you) learning self-control and wisdom and perseverance. You do this because you love your children, the way a parent ought to love his or her child, with a love that would break every bone rather than truly harm the beloved.

What is the government’s priority? What does it want out of your kids? Are its priorities and wants actually good for your child?

We all know that some governments at least have evil intentions. You can probably think of an administration in Tennessee which you’ve had significant disagreements with, and you can definitely think of a federal administration you regard as ill-intentioned. I can list off a whole slew of federal tyrannical Supreme Court proclamations: McCulloch v. Maryland, Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges. The latter two were blatantly evil. So we know governments sometimes have evil intentions. Does this affect how they educate your kids?

In 1971, an advisory subcommittee on population formed by the Michigan state government filed a report advocating for net-zero population growth, as can be found starting on page 101 of the PDF downloadable here (book pages, not PDF pages). The methods they advocated were diverse: political, regulative, and economic means all featured. Notable for our purposes today, however, are the following recommendation: “Since basic attitudes and values are formed early in life, and since it is the youth of society who are yet capable of determining the size of future families, a program for all levels of formal education can be a powerful way to change society’s attitudes and values on the question of population size as outlined above“ (102). The report elaborated further on what change needed to be accomplished in children’s education: “This will require vigorous action to remove the topic of sex from the closets of obscurity in which conservative elements in our society have placed it...” (102). Sound familiar?

This same report also advocated for “distributive policies,” policies which “involve the distribution of resources and opportunities to people who choose to modify their behavior to conform with the socially desired patterns[, which] thus operate as incentives rather than as official constraints…“ (103). What sort of incentives are offered by free public schooling or school vouchers? At the least, they tempt us to rely on government programs.

As we see, governments have factually had evil objectives in education. A farther-from home example is the Chinese system, which used operant conditioning (Behavioral Modification) in order to inculcate unquestioning, unthinking obedience to the state (unthinking obedience is the point of Behavioral Modification and its descendants, incidentally) (pg. 98, 135).

Of government in general, therefore, we are properly to ask the question: what are a government’s natural preferences for education’s outcome? What are a parent’s natural preferences? Do they match?

I do not speak here of government by angels. As Madison put it, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” No, I speak of government by human men, men who have, in nearly all cases, sought out that power. I speak of government as an institution into which corrupt men will creep, to be dislodged only by the most strenuous effort of the citizenry. I speak of government we actually have.

Government’s usual objective is to get a little more power (or a lot more). Even the most conservative government has the odd tendency to plead that if you just give it a little more power, it’ll fix everything. Power tempts every man, and politicians have access to so much of it. Even beside this, the government has an obvious interest in self-perpetuation, a legitimate interest at the base, so long as it self-perpetuates through justice, not tyranny.

Government therefore has a double incentive to teach its citizens to trust and obey government. On the one hand, such a citizenry will gladly hand over more and more power to the government, trusting it will be well-used to fix the problems of society. On the other hand, such citizens are much less likely to actually overthrow the government. Well, in actuality this path is a bit like riding a tiger or feeding a drug addiction: stop furthering the citizenry’s reliance, and they’ll be liable to rebel, demanding to be infantilized further.

Modern America, if we look at it honestly, exhibits just these symptoms. The mainstream culture is to give the government more and more power; even in Tennessee we’re prone to this. Don’t rely, here, just on your own experience. Consider the tendency across society. Hasn’t America’s government swelled and swelled, buoyed ever by loud voices demanding government fix the problems (all the voices to the contrary, they are much smaller and more stifled). No, government education is far from the only potential culprit, but the fruit seems to suggest a tree, a tree which matches what we’d expect from even slightly corrupt government education. Perhaps the government will agree with David Hornbeck, the Maryland state schools’ superintendent, that “the goal [is] to help all students understand that to be fully human one must serve” (Page 217). Serve who? In that context, Hornbeck referred to the government.

In light of this, should we let the government define what being a good citizen means? What being a good person means? That is what it will be doing, by necessity, if it has your kid for hours every week-day, teaching and training. You can counteract it, but you shouldn’t have to.

And have you ever heard of a government program that didn’t get corrupt eventually? There’s a reason official have to be elected every few years (and why many want term limits).

In the modern American system, the administrative state, with is manifold bureaucrats and officials, wields much of the power to decide what will be valued in schooling. Do you believe that those people are more likely to care for your kid than you are? Remember, you didn’t choose them. You might have helped choose the guy that chose them, or the guy that chose the guy that chose them, but they have no direct responsibility to you, to the parents, no matter what they say in the media.

I’m not a parent, not yet. I’ve been blessed, however, with a father and mother who followed God in heart, mind, soul, and strength (Matt. 22:37), and I’ve lived under their love for all my years. I’ve seen how their love seeks my good, even when it hurts in the short term for everybody involved and how they desire not to be greater by me but that I would be blessed by them. They are imperfect (all children of Adam are imperfect (Rom. 3:10-23; 1 John 1:8-10). Yet I have no doubt that they seek my spiritual and physical good, that I may be “equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17), ready for the world’s travails. That love determined their priorities in educating me and my siblings.

The government must and will have different priorities for your kid than you do. The government isn’t your kid’s parent, however much it may want to be. Individuals within the government will often be well-intentioned, but the incentives of government overall are to use education as a way to increase government’s power and longevity, to shape society. Education is a potent power indeed, and power corrupts, is a temptation to corruption. A parent can counter that temptation through the overwhelming love a parent has for his child. The government has no such love; it has only the temptation, tempered by lesser motivations and by external monitoring. If parents sometimes go rotten despite that overwhelming love, should we expect the government to stay healthy without it?

Even if we wanted the government to have parental love towards our children, it wouldn’t be possible. The parent-child relationship is deeply personal, your child and you, not merely ‘a child’ and ‘an adult.’ Government official simply can’t have parental love towards the children of the citizenry. They aren’t those children’s parents, not by blood or by adoption. Therefore, any claim the government makes to that status (when the kid already has a parent) stands quite close in morality of the one who “steals a man” in Exodus 21:16. From such evil root, no good can spring, no true love (Job 14:4; Rom. 13:10)

The government’s relationship with your children is not the same as your relationship. The government does not love your children, not like you do. Even though it’s possible for a government education to be well-intentioned (for a time), we must confront the facts. Parents are much, much more motivated to care for their children than the government ever could be, and the government, in the history of the past century, cares about children primarily as a method of determining the culture the government is going to have to rule in a few years. We should not replace the parent, who loves his or her child, with the government, which has every incentive to view the child only as a manipulable cipher.

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