Mises also pointed out that in a country with several linguistic communities, the fight over educational curricula would be bitter indeed. Depending on which language was the common one of instruction, one group could dominate the others.
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The simple fact is that there are no solutions to these conflicts, so long as the government is involved. For example, most Americans — whether deeply religious or skeptical — would agree that a government-run school should permit a child to close his eyes and say a prayer in his head before lunch, but that it would be wildly inappropriate for the history teacher at a government school to have sixth graders write essays on why the Protestants rescued the Christian faith from Catholic heresy. The problem is, there is no principled dividing line between these two extremes. As we move from one end of the spectrum to the other, more Americans would change their mind from “that’s OK” to “no way, that’s government taking sides!” Yet any rule we try to establish, to guide employees at government-run schools, would be largely arbitrary. The only real solution is to privatize schooling altogether and let families, churches, and secular institutions voluntarily come up with their own curricula and rules for student behavior.
The expansion of government into all areas of our lives has carried with it great economic inefficiency. Yet more insidious is that it inevitably pits citizens against each other. Disagreements that would lie dormant and benign as a private matter of conscience suddenly become causes for bitter strife when injected into the coercive political realm.
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