State Schools Are an Inevitable Source of Ethnic Conflict
Mike Reid writes: The great antifascist scholar Ludwig von Mises warned that government schools are an inevitable source of ethnic conflict, because dominant nationalities can use them to indoctrinate children from other cultures, pulling them away from their parents and communities.[1] In Canada, this was explicitly the aim of the Indian residential schools, which sought to “kill the Indian in the child.”[2]
The Canadian government began the schooling of aboriginal children in earnest by setting up the residential-school program in 1883. The goal was to take kids away from their disobedient, barbarian parents and make them into submissive, civilized British subjects.
By the time the last of the Indian residential schools closed its doors in 1996, they were infamous for rock-bottom standards of education and sky-high rates of physical and sexual assault against children.[3]
But the source of the brutality in residential schools was essentially the same as that of other public schools in multicultural states. Mises, an Austrian Jew, was probably thinking about the ethnic strife in his homeland when he wrote,
In those extensive areas in which peoples speaking different languages live together side by side … [t]he school can alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong.… Whoever controls the schools has the power to injure other nationalities and to benefit his own. (Liberalism, p. 114)
In Canada, the cultural gulf between the ruling English, French, and Scottish cultures and the dozens of subjugated aboriginal cultures was exceptionally wide. Many Europeans believed it was their own destiny to dominate this wild land, and the natives’ destiny to disappear or assimilate. But the natives were not going away quietly.
In 1886, one year after armed Métis and Cree uprisings in the western prairies, Indian-school inspector John McRae remarked, “It is unlikely that any Tribe or tribes would give trouble of a serious nature to the Government whose members had children completely under Government control.”[4]
Come for the Food. Stay for the Shackles.
The state hired clergymen to run the schools (partly because they were cheap to hire), and as a result many former students identify their awful experiences with missionary Christianity rather than with coercive government. Certainly, many supposedly Christian teachers in the residential schools have foul crimes to answer for.
But the state appointed the principals; it built the schools; it paid for the system. Most importantly, the state corralled the children through the school doors.
The government schools were compulsory for all Indians under age 16. State agents enforced this rule only sporadically at first, but the government had other methods of persuasion.