Educated Force

We don't need to education
We don't need no though control
--Pink Floyd

While finishing up Paterson (1943), ran across a nice passage about the folly of public education (again, paragraph breaks inserted by me):

"There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

"If this principle really is not understood, let any parent holding a positive religious faith consider how it would seem to him if his children were taken by force and taught an opposite creed. Would he not recognize tyranny naked?...

"The intrinsic nature of the power authorized was so little realized that this was called "free education," the most absolute contradiction of facts by terminology of which the language is capable."

This books was a great read. And like others of its time period, could have been written yesterday.