By Crispin Sartwell

There's no such thing as public education. Education happens to exactly one person at a time.

There are some things that you have to do youself. I can't take your leak. Your own death is a task assigned to yourself alone; no amount of other people's dying in itself kills you. You can't have my education; your education is a private task that is given to yourself. The education of someone or everyone else doesn't add a single item to your stock of knowledge.

And there's no such thing as compulsory education. Education is something that each of us gives to ourselves or allows others to give us. Otherwise we call it indoctrination, we call it assault, but we don't call it knowledge.

The other day I saw the following slogan plastered on the walls of my son's elementary school: "have the courage to stand up for what you believe in."

Now let's do a bit of semiotics. First, this banner is a product that's marketed to elementary schools for their walls by some school supply company: in fact a variety of slogans in a variety of colorful fonts graced the SES walls.

Second, no one actually sees it at all: it's a form of wallpaper. It's not intended to communicate information, but to brighten our day very slightly with a set of words that has so often been repeated that no one's brain gets any traction on it anymore. Really it is intended to be a set of high-sounding nonsense syllables.

But third, if we work ourselves up to the point where we are able to focus long enough to figure out what it means, we immediately realize that it is absolutely false. The people who put that sign up want anything, everything, except for your child to have the courage to stand up for what she believes in.

The reason Vince and I were in the school in the first place was to retrieve his health text. Vincie's teacher had called that afternoon to say that Vince had refused to take a test: that he sat there quietly, but simply refused to make any marks on the paper.

Asked why, Vince said that the material was stupid, and that it was exactly the same thing he had been learning in health for the last several years: how to make decisions, how to deal with stress, etc.: stuff Vince doesn't seem to think bears repeating.

So we went to the school to get the book. I read the chapter. The material was a bit goofy, and perhaps not exactly what you'd usually think of as education, but it wasn't (as I'd feared, given previous experience) moronically written or sheer propaganda. Personally, I'd have taken the test.

But they weren't giving me the test. They were giving it to Vince, who seemed suddenly to have come across the courage to stand up for what he believed in. And then the teacher explained to me why Vince had to take the test, aside from the fact that he'd get a zero: "it is approved curriculum."

You know this and I know this: No one anywhere in the American public schools is encouraged to stand up for what they believe in. Teachers are required to teach the approved curricula like a little chorus of playback devices. Their success is measured by mechanical performance on standardized tests.

And if you think American public schools value independent thought you are living in an hallucination. No large institution values independent thought, and public schools actively despise and punish it; they demand and attempt to enforce and reward mindless obedience. That, and not Algebra, is what they are designed to teach. That is their fundamental purpose, the real justification of their existence.

If you don't believe this to be true, notice that refusing to take a test on the grounds that you object to the material is treated in exactly the same way as, say, acting up on the playground. The punishment (we'll call your parents; send you to the principal; suspend you, etc) is the same. For the institution, the infraction is the same: disobedience. That Vince's refusal was a principled objection is irrelevant to the institution, because the institution has nothing to do with intellect.

A phrase like "Have the courage to stand up for what you believe in" appearing on the wall of a public school is sheer cant, or rather sheer ideology. Just as the Soviet Union proclaimed that it was dedicated to human liberation, the public school proclaims that it is dedicated to independent thought.

What the public schools want from our children and for that matter from its own teachers is just what the Soviet Union wanted from its citizens: a continual enactment of the empty forms of obedience, continual self-betrayal. You can call that freedom and courage if you want, but that doesn't mean that deep in your heart you don't know it's slavery and cowardice.

Today Vince is going to take that test. Mr. Lebo will assign him a number. That number will not mean anything about what Vince knows. That was never the point. It will mean nothing about Vince's future; think about how the grade you got on any given test in 6th grade has affected your long-term prospects. That number represents one thing: obedience to the institution.

There's no such thing as public education. What we have is a system of public capitulation.