Recently, one quarter of the nation’s states complained loudly to the federal government about being "told what to do" with their remaining "water" for education. Twelve states passed resolutions criticizing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA), and 138 Pennsylvania school superintendents protested the Act’s provisions.
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The Collectivist’s Religion
In the 20th century, state-controlled education has marked the reign of nearly every major dictator, who recognized that he could mold the minds of the nation’s youth through the schools. "At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each schoolchild in Italy is studying," boasted Benito Mussolini. On another occasion the fascist ruler declared: "It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity."
In 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a congress of Party education workers stated:
We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.
Bolshevik education policy meant the displacement of the family as the nation’s most important and fundamental social unit, the establishment of institutes to train state-approved teachers, and the disassociation of education from the church and its traditional values. Sound familiar?
Communists and fascists were not the only collectivists interested in monopolizing education. In 1937, Australian historian Stephen H. Roberts published a book entitled The House That Hitler Built. In his book, Roberts described public education under National Socialism in Germany:
The Nazis have laid a heavy hand on education. They know that the textbooks of today are shaping the political realities of the decades to come, and accordingly have made every part of education — curiously enough, even mathematics — a training ground in Nazi ideology. As soon as the child enters an elementary school (Grundschule) at the age of six, his days are given over to the idealizing of the Nazis.
For those daring enough to challenge such totalitarian encroachments upon the family, Hitler had a prepackaged response. On November 6, 1933, Hitler confidently stated,
When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already.... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
Что-то я сомневаюсь, как к этому NCLBA относиться. С одной стороны, некоторым штатам не помешал бы пинок под зад в области образования. С другой стороны - децентрализация и плюрализм в США - важнейший фактор обеспечения гибкости, пзволяющий обходить загнивание в зонах локальных оптимумов, и, таким образом, непрерывный прогресс.