If you want to make sure that the state, and not the parents, are raising a child, it is important to co-opt the parent early on. While having most parents unaware of what schools are teaching now-a-days, it is optimal, from the vantage point of the state, to nonetheless get to the children as early as possible.

John R. Lott, of “More Guns, Less Crime” fame, expounded on this almost twenty years ago, with statistical evidence from across the globe, in an article entitled “Public Schooling, Indoctrination, and Totalitarianism“:

“Governments use public education and public ownership of schools and the media to control the information that their citizens receive. More totalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth transfers make greater investments in publicly controlled information. This finding is borne out from cross sectional time-series evidence across countries, and is confirmed when specifically examining the recent fall of communism. My results reject the standard public good’s view linking education and democracy, and I find evidence that public educational expenditures vary in similar ways to government ownership of television stations.”

It is still timely today.

The article can be read below:

Public Schooling, Indoctrination, and Totalitarianism by ThePoliticalHat on Scribd

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