The state has no educational authority of its own apart from what parents delegate to it.

Peonage for the Twenty-First Century

by Anthony Esolen

The Common Core exists only because we have forgotten that parents have a right to educate their children. The state has no educational authority of its own apart from what parents delegate to it.

A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They're all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children's bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of their minds.”

So bald a proclamation of totalitarian power might cost the party that made it a percentage point or two at the polls. Thus, it will never actually grace a marriage license. Yet there is no need to make that proclamation when the arrogation of that power is an accomplished fact. An underling who does not realize his subservient position is more tractable than one who does.

I've lately been involved in the fight against the latest move to nationalize public education, this one called the Common Core. It is a bag of rotten old ideas doused with disinfectant; its assumptions are hostile to classical and Christian approaches to education; it is starkly utilitarian; its self-promotion is sludged up with edu-lingo, thick with verbiage and thin in thought; its drafters have forgotten, if they ever knew, what it is to be a child.

But my point here is not that the Common Core is dreadful. It is this: that there should even be a Common Core proves how far we have fallen into peonage to the State.

I have said many hard things about the poor preparation of many of our public school teachers, about English teachers who do not know grammar and who cannot write, about history teachers who settle down into current events, requiring no broad reading or knowledge, about math teachers who have no facility with numbers, and about foreign language teachers who hold their students in bonds for four years and yet do not manage to teach them how to read a newspaper, much less Don Quixote or Les Miserables.

In a farming village or a small town in 1889—I am choosing the year advisedly—the most learned person in the congregation on a Sunday was the parson, and the second most, the lawyer, the doctor, or the schoolteacher. That is no longer the case.

Critics of the public schools since James Koerner's The Miseducation of American Teachers (1963) have noticed that the willingness to submit oneself to an empty bachelor's degree in education is nearly a negative intelligence test. The best students do not put up with it. It is why private schools succeed best when they hire teachers from outside the accrediting apparatus of the state. A private school can hire me to teach poetry to seniors, as I have been teaching poetry for almost three decades to their slightly older siblings in college. A public school cannot.

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