Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
The greatest phenomenon of the Twentieth Century is the rise of the secular religion of Statism. Just why and how it got going is not germane to this argument, but it is a certainty that the spread of Statism was facilitated by our schools. The votaries of this religion, whether by design or easy slithering, got themselves on the school payroll and, as evangelists have always done, went in for proselytising.
In the course of time, the students, indoctrinated in the schoolroom, manned the State; most naturally, they took their religious beliefs with them. So, we have a State religion coming in, so to say, by the back door.
Statism is a religion. It is a frame of thought based on improvable hypotheses. Its primary assumption is that the State is a living entity, independent of its personnel. You can change the laws or the basic constitution, say the devotees of Statism, you can make a democracy into an absolutism, you can throw out the old crowd and vote in a new one—but the State is immutable. Mortals come and go; the State is…
Statism has its rituals, its prayers—“the State can do no wrong”—its hierarchy and its holy edifices. It even has the inevitable schisms and sects: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, New Dealism. The differences between them are ritualistic, in the main, and follow from the degree of power achieved; as between Communism and New Dealism, for instance, the difference is that in one private property is abolished outright while in the other private property is taxed outright.
Regardless of these schismatic differences, all the sects are agreed on the basic assumption that “divinity doth hedge” the State.
This is the religion that is being taught or insinuated in our schools, from the lowest grades to the post graduate courses. A junior high school teacher (in New York) is required to take her “social science” class each week to some municipal department and explain its workings. Her explanations may be objective, but the multitude of desks in the tax department, the magnitude of the water works, the complicated mechanism of the sanitation department all have an educational influence. The glory of the State is the constant obbligato of such teaching. (This, by the way, is a technique of what is called “progressive” education.)…
Thus, a spurious religion, one that threatens our freedom more than any the Founding Fathers had in mind when they laid down the doctrine of separatism, has invaded our political institutions. For the same reasons that impelled them to bar the Church, the school should now be barred. In the interests of freedom, the public school should be dropped.
But, how? It seems to be an impossible operation; and yet, the legislature of South Carolina has inadvertently hit on a way. It has passed a law permitting local communities to go out of the business of education and to rent their buildings and equipment to private institutions.
If that idea were generally accepted and put into practice, neither Protestants, Catholics, Jews nor atheists would be compelled to support schools teaching the new, secular religion. The Statists, if they could find paying customers, could have their own schools, and be welcome. Every group would be free to teach whatever values seem best to them.
Under the South Carolina plan, the citizenry would be relieved of school taxes. Parents could then support schools of their own choice. And those parents who now suffer “double taxation”—support of the schools that furnish the education they want, and taxes for the other kind—would be in position to provide scholarships for children whose parents are less fortunate.
South Carolina has shown us the way to improve our educational system—a way that could lead us out of the clutches of Statism.