The American State and Academic Freedom

The American state system of education professes an academic righteousness to which it has no valid claim, for this system is guilty of many violations of academic freedom. Discussion in this matter has heretofore been mainly restricted to various pressures put upon the rights of faculty to free inquiry and free expression. The present article will single out one neglected aspect of academic freedom, namely, the economic pressures exerted by the state against educational groups, faculty, parents, and students who dissent from the educational philosophies in the state schools. The intention here is not to deny the state’s right to conduct its own schools nor to belittle the achievements of these schools, but to demonstrate that the state violates the academic freedom of many citizens by taking a monopoly or near monopoly of the education tax for the support of its schools and of the private values enshrined therein, while denying an equitable share of this tax to other educators and to other values. In effect the state has created a dangerous establishment over the minds of men.

The state replies that its schools, far from being inimical to academic freedom, are rather the champions of the academic rights of all its citizens. It contends either that state schools are value-free institutions confining themselves solely to the teaching of academic content; or that their system of values is public and neutral and therefore at least reasonably acceptable to all American taxpayers; and that their approaches to knowledge are correct and therefore worthy of monopoly backing with the public tax dollar. But these contentions are false.

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Francis J. Brown

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The American state system of education professes an academic righteousness to which it has no valid claim, for this system is guilty of many violations of academic freedom. Discussion in this matter has heretofore been mainly restricted to various pressures put upon the rights of faculty to free inquiry and free expression. The present article will single out one neglected aspect of academic freedom, namely, the economic pressures exerted by the state against educational groups, faculty, parents, and students who dissent from the educational philosophies in the state schools. The intention here is not to deny the state’s right to conduct its own schools nor to belittle the achievements of these schools, but to demonstrate that the state violates the academic freedom of many citizens by taking a monopoly or near monopoly of the education tax for the support of its schools and of the private values enshrined therein, while denying an equitable share of this tax to other educators and to other values. In effect the state has created a dangerous establishment over the minds of men.

The state replies that its schools, far from being inimical to academic freedom, are rather the champions of the academic rights of all its citizens. It contends either that state schools are value-free institutions confining themselves solely to the teaching of academic content; or that their system of values is public and neutral and therefore at least reasonably acceptable to all American taxpayers; and that their approaches to knowledge are correct and therefore worthy of monopoly backing with the public tax dollar. But these contentions are false.