Review: Breaking the Education Monopoly

January-February 1996

Even before the dust had settled from the toppling of guard towers, concrete walls, and statues of party leaders, parents and teachers throughout the former Soviet bloc began plotting radical change of their state-dominated education systems and joining together to start independent schools. The Communist project of creating a "new humanity" through rigidly controlled schools had backfired, and rejection of "party pedagogy" had helped fuel opposition to Communist regimes. Now, by collaborating to redesign education policy and by constructing independent schools, liberated citizens are again taking charge of their lives and reconstituting the institutions of civil society that the party-states had crushed.

This is the instructive story told in Charles Glenn's new book, Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe (Cato Institute, 1995). Glenn, education professor at Boston University and member of the Center's Advisory Council, is also the author of a key survey of educational freedom in the West, Choice of Schools in Six Nations (1989), and of a path breaking study of the ideology of uniform public schooling, The Myth of the Common School (1988).

In his new book, Glenn explains the Communist Party's ideal of education, with its deep hostility to religion and independent institutions. Then, in separate chapters on the various countries that fell under the Soviet yoke, he skillfully details the specific ways this educational/political philosophy was implemented, and the diverse ways it is now being replaced as educational freedom flowers.

What a shameful irony, then, that public officials in our own "land of the free" suppressed this important study! President Bush's Department of Education commissioned the book, but then declined to publish it. President Clinton's new team had to be shamed into releasing a paltry 200 copies—after deleting those parts critical of our own educational system. Fortunately the Cato Institute, Washington's premier libertarian think tank, has now published the whole text with a new foreword and conclusion.

—Stanley W. Carlson-Thies