Benjamin McLean (@BenMcLean)

I don't want to suggest that conservatives of past generations were bad people necessarily when I say this. My point isn't to denigrate past generations. However, I don't think Reagan and the baby boomers were correct on the whole role-of-government topic. I think that they were well-intentioned but naïve and ineffective. The role of government to "promote the general welfare" of the people of the United States is explicitly stated in the preamble to the Constitution. So Constitutionalism is fundamentally incompatible with anti-welfare anarcho-capitalist libertarianism. America's Founding Fathers knew, and they were correct on this point, that the public sector had an important and indispensable role to play in society, especially in the area of education. John Adams said, "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." I would assert that not only was this a largely uncontroversial view of America's Founding Fathers but also that it is correct. This doesn't mean we need a federal department of education but it does mean that public education is part of the proper role of government at some level and that means, since school is a formative institution, it is part of the proper role of government to decide what kind of people we want our future citizens to be. (and the converse, in what kind of people we don't want them to become) Any particular thing schools choose to teach has an opportunity cost, because we can't teach everything so the time spent teaching any particular thing, no matter what it is, can't be spent on teaching something else. So every single thing schools choose to teach must of necessity be based on a moral judgement about the value of the thing being taught: that it is worth teaching over something else. This entails that we can infer the moral value system of any educational program from what it chooses to teach and not to teach. This is why there is no such thing as value neutral education. All education is indoctrination. The terms "education" and "indoctrination" are synonyms. Every course is propaganda and this isn't a criticism: it's a definition. Schools cannot avoid being this way no matter what they do because this is what schools are, inherently and fundamentally. So to complain that schools are propagandizing or indoctrinating our children instead of "just teaching facts" is foolish. Indoctrinating children is what schools are for. There's no such thing as just teaching facts, because every selection of facts is grounded in a moral value system. The only rational complaint would be not that schools are indoctrinating children, but only that they are indoctrinating children into the wrong things. The problem isn't that the schools contain propaganda: the problem is that the schools don't contain OUR propaganda. The solution isn't to shrink government: (because that never happens) it's to apply government power to the ends we think best. Here is my goal for political action: I want to use law and business and every means possible to make young people becoming Christians -- which inherently entails being what we call "socially conservative" -- the default position, so that you have to go out of your way for your offspring to become anything else.