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by Jacob G. Hornberger

It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist program than public (i.e., government) schooling. The state makes attendance mandatory. Funding is through coercion, i.e., taxation. Everyone in the system, including the teachers, works for the state. The state decides on the textbooks, the curriculum, and the textbooks. Everything is politicized.

DeSantis’s Socialist Measures to Condemn Communism

Republicans sometimes introduce a bit of humor into public life, even if they have no intention of being funny. 

A recent example is Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Undoubtedly catering to Cuban-Americans in the hope of garnering their votes, DeSantis recently signed a bill establishing November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day” to honor the millions of people who have suffered under communist regimes.

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No, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is what follows. According to DeSantis’s website, the bill “calls for public schools to observe the day. High school students will be required to receive at least 45 minutes of instruction in their required United States Government class on topics related to communist regimes and how victims suffered at the hands of these regimes.”

Is that funny, or what? 

Of course, your standard Republican wouldn’t laugh or even smile because he would have no idea why such a measure would be funny to libertarians.

It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist program than public (i.e., government) schooling. The state makes attendance mandatory. Funding is through coercion, i.e., taxation. Everyone in the system, including the teachers, works for the state. The state decides on the textbooks, the curriculum, and the textbooks. Everything is politicized. (See  FFF’s award-winning bookSeparating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman.)

As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the most important aspect of public (i.e., government) schooling is its purpose. Its mission is to mold the minds of children into having a deep reverence for the state and a mindset of deference to authority of government officials. That’s what those classes in “United States Government” to which DeSantis refers are for. The public-school experience becomes a 12-year sentence of indoctrination, regimentation, and obedience to orders. It’s an army-lite version of the life of a draftee in the U.S. military. 

By the time students graduate from high school, they hate education but they love the government, eagerly trust government officials, believe whatever government officials tell them, and blindly do whatever public officials say, just like your standard military draftee. Good examples are the JFK assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the twenty years of lies relating to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and those infamous but nonexistent WMDs in Iraq.

There is something important to note about Cuba and other communist regimes: They have public (i.e., government) school systems there too. The big difference, however, is that people in communist nations know that public (i.e., government) schooling is a socialist system.

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