[.ca] Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's ... (ISBN 0964044722)

Shows how government schooling harmful to society.:
The author traces the ignoble history of imposed schooling from Sparta, through Prussia, to the United States. He makes a compelling case for why schooling should not be funded, compelled, and defined by the state.

Public Education should exist, but under parental control:
Sheldon Richman has some valid arguments, but ignores why the earlier forms of public education were started in Prussia--because the rural population was so illiterate that royal laws could not be read, and laws were not being followed. After Prussian villiages instituted Pietist pedagogy into a public education system, they soon had little need of jails, and morality soared. Richman's viewpoint launches an extreme Libertarian arrow that overshoots the target as much as today's beaurocratic public education misses the target. Public charter school laws free the hands of parents who start them from government regulation. Michigan is having great success in this area. Private schools and home schools work also. Education for the masses was established to promote the internal desire to serve the common good through moral behavior. In the twentieth century, public education reversed its purpose to become preoccupied with the individualism of "self-esteem" and "moral relativism." The result has been a return to the ills suffered in the middle ages. These include dramatic increases in ignorance, laziness, crime, and overall immorality. These would also be the results of following Sheldon Richman's extremist position.

Another Great Sheldon Richman Book!:
Buy it. Read it. Pass it on. How can anyone, short of a socialist, not be permanently moved by Sheldon's books? Try "Tethered Citizens," too!

A clear presentation of an unassailable case:
The very title of this book shocks many. The concept of education being free of governmental influence--or more bluntly, the idea that public schools are a harmful farce that should be eliminated--goes against everything most of us have been told, have accepted, and have grown up with. Yet the case is made, and the evidence is overwhelming. The historical examination of education in this country is almost worth the purchase alone. What, we haven't always had public schools? What, people resisted public schools early on and had to have their children enrolled almost literally at gunpoint? This sets the stage for the examination of why we have public schools now, where the idea came from, how it works, what's wrong with it, and why it should be abolished. The points are ironclad; in fact, once you see how radically government involvement in the provision of education differs from that of other goods and services--such as health care, financial assistance, and even food--you'll begin to see how education in the U.S. has become the tangled, irrepairable mess that it now is. The thing which secures the fifth star for this book however, is its raising of another, almost revolutionary thought: that the current day model of education (teacher lecturing to seated students, grading papers, and so on) is part of the problem, and less than ideal. The concept actually fits hand-in-hand with his call for free-market education, as unfettered innovation in the educational field should naturally yield new and better methods of teaching children what they and their parents want to learn. Five stars for bold, clear presentation of a controversial viewpoint, fresh historical revelations, solid defense of the viewpoint (with rebuttals to key objections), and examination of the idea taken to its logical conclusions.

A Passionate Polemic:
Most of the last three generations of Americans grew up attending public schools, therefore it is unsurprising that so few people question the premise behind it. After all, as Sheldon Richman poinst out in this highly charged book, why is it that we trust the free market to provide us with important things like food and clothing, while we think nothing of permitting education to be a government run enterprise? After reading Separating School & State, it will be hard to look at public education in America the same way ever again. Richman discusses the origins of public schooling in America, how educators like Horace Mann were influenced by the public schools in Prussia, apparently unaware that the schools there served the function of molding children to be dutiful servants of the state. My only fault with Separating School & State is that I would like to have seen more discussion about possible free market educational models, but that is probably a book to be written some other day. Richman's book should be read in tandem with Myron Lieberman's Public Education: An Autopsy. Whereas Richman arouses the passions of those like myself with his take no prisoners approach and his libertarian perspective, Lieberman's prose is much drier as he explains that the public school model is inherently faulty because it is a model that is more concerned with protecting the education providers than in serving the real needs of the education consumers.