By Jacob Engels

The American experiment to provide public education to ensure individuals have the judgment necessary to secure their liberty has evolved into a system used to foster dependence on government and destroy freedom.

Since Thomas Jefferson advocated public education, Americans on both sides of the political aisle have treated the necessity of public education as being beyond question. It has been presumed the fabric of society and creation of knowledge is dependent upon public education. To question whether public education should exist is in short to question the existence of civilization.

This common cultural view of public education remained dominant as American voluntary public education offered by local communities evolved into massively centralized state and federal bureaucracies. These bureaucracies now mandate attendance and impose curriculum’s designed to impose social engineering agendas promoting collectivism rather than educating students.

Public education is now a set of firmly entrenched bureaucracies that increasingly fail to teach the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. One look no further than the competitive disadvantage many graduates of American public find themselves in as they are tossed into a hyper-competitive global information economy. Rather than address these problems, the commonly held view is that public education must be supported at all costs so that it may continue to provide education that it no longer supplies.

Mountains of evidence regarding the uncompetitive-ness of American public education and the plethora of political agendas in the curriculum’s has accumulated–I strongly encourage people to read work done by scholars such as Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman on public education.

Today the question is not whether public education is necessary to preserve a liberty and sustain knowledge but rather how will American liberty be preserved under the all powerful compulsory public education system? If the government’s grip on the minds of public through compulsory public education is not broken then public education will secure its future as the death of liberty rather than the being a cornerstone of democracy.

In the early development of America, Thomas Jefferson realized the finite resources of the country could only provide endless bounty if the resources were carefully husbanded by a decentralized group of farmers that were free to innovate and motivated by their private property ownership interests. As the 19th century progressed, however, it was impossible to ignore the shift from Jefferson’s yeoman farmer to the increasingly centralized and urban manufacturing economy dotted not by independent self-governing farmers but by urban renters and wage laborers in an increasingly centralized economy.

For decades, the American industrial base has provided a continually improved quality of life and has driven economic progress throughout the world, but it has also led to a loss of an independent and freedom loving spirit that is at the core of the success of America and the advancement of liberty.

Commentators ranging from Karl Marx to Andrew Jackson have criticized wage earning in the industrial age for leaving individual laborers to bargain for wages against increasingly powerful industrial concerns to the mass of the population losing individual economic ownership and the ability to be self-governing.

These arguments have been to some degree set aside during the many decades that industrialization provided economic growth, but it is reemerging as the growth and cost of government at all levels is consuming an ever larger share of wages.

As the American wage earner is now required to compete globally in an economy crushed by the cost of government, American wage earners struggle to maintain their jobs while facing the reality that even if they are employed their wages are largely consumed by taxes and government imposed expenses that do not contribute to their economic well-being. In short they are increasingly becoming wage slaves employed for the sake of paying the government rather than being free people working for their individual material wellbeing.

Americans have repeatedly proven their ability to compete when freed from the heavy hand of government intrusion; the need for the spirit of American liberty to re-emerge is essential if Americans are going to overcome the economic problems created by Washington’s preference for commanding and controlling the direction of the economy.

Congress and the Obama administration have demonstrated their desire for large portions of the American economy to be brought under control of the federal government. Private financial institutions have been taken over, auto companies have been nationalized, the government is intent upon controlling healthcare and bailouts for failing media companies and numerous other schemes for the government to control a larger and larger share of the economy have been proposed.

The intent of this article is to begin a conversation about moving beyond government solutions to economic problems to how individual Americans might restore their God given liberty and continue pursuing economic progress. Without such a shift, most Americans can count on the cost of government rendering them wage slaves incapable of self-governance.