The Notion of the State Doing Everything, Until Finally It Replaces All Private Existence, Is the Great Leftist Dream; So the Left Tends to Have a Ministry of Education to Control All Aspects of Education

Concerning education, the leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything, until finally it replaces all private existence, is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus the leftist tends to have city or state schools—or a ministry of education—control all aspects of education. As an example there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality—the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. Quite naturally, it is especially true in countries where “democratism”—democracy as an ism—is promoted, where pains are taken to ignore differences in IQs and in personal effort, where marks tend to be eliminated and promotion to the next grade becomes automatic.

--Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 27.