Family Vs. Community
From an old thoughtful post by TGGP, [quoting Steven Pinker]:
Every political and religious movement in history has sought to undermine the family. The reasons are obvious. Not only is the family a rival coalition competing for a person’s loyalties, but it is a rival with an unfair advantage: relatives innately care for one another more than comrades do. They bestow nepotistic benefits, forgive the daily frictions that strain other organizations, and stop at nothing to avenge wrongs against a member. Leninism, Nazism, and other totalitarian ideologies always demand a new loyalty “higher” than, and contrary to, family ties. So have religions from early Christianity to the Moonies […]
Successful religions and states eventually realize they have to coexist with families, but they do what they can to contain them, particularly the most threatening ones. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has found that the incest laws of most cultures are not created to deal with the problem of borther-sister marriages; brothers and sisters don’t want to marry to begin with. Although brother-sister incest may be included in the prohibition and may help to legitimize it, the real targets of the laws are marriages that threaten the interests of the lawmakers. The rules ban marriages among more distant relatives like cousins, and are promulgated by the rulers of stratified societies to prevent wealth and poewr from accumulating in families, which could be future rivals.
This fits with my interpretation of the World Values Survey as saying that the two main dimensions distinguishing cultural values today is (1) wealth and (2) “families and personal relations” versus “larger community health and threats.” I suggested:
The central Asia history of invasion after invasion is deeply ingrained in their culture, while island and geographically peripheral cultures were less obsessed by it. It is ironic that the cultures like Russia with values focused on competing against other communities lost the last big community conflict, the Cold War. Have China, Korea, Japan, etc. learned their lesson about over-centralization, enough to win the next big conflict?
What evidence do you have that public schooling has been successful in reaching the ends you describe?Over the 20th century we have seen many social changes that would have horrified many of the Establishment at the start of the 20th century. For example, the Civil Rights Movement, leading eventually in a black guy being elected President of the USA, the second wave of feminism, resulting in women being elected leaders of countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and India, the gay movement, leading to homosexuality being legalised and the current battle over same-sex marriage, or the neoliberal revolution deregulating markets and questionining Keyneisan orthodoxy. If public schools were intended to incalculate citizens in obedience then they've been rather massive failures at it.
In Colonial times, well the Americans revolted against the British, so they don't appear to have been particularly inoculated by obedience then. And funnily enough, the US is typically more religious than other Western countries, despite most other Western countries teaching Christainity in schools while it's forbidden in the USA (arguably, because religions in the USA don't have government support, they have to be on their toes more in keeping people faithful).
Please note I don't dispute what the aims were of public schools, I just dispute your claim about what public schools actually do achieve.
Intuitively seems wrong to me too.