[School Stories] Public Education Through 300

In 480 BC, a Persian army of 1 million invaded Sparta in Greece. Spartan King Leonidas, unable to obtain the approval of the assembly, went out to the battlefield with his 300 bodyguards and faced them. All but one died a heroic death, but in the end they defeated the massive Persian force. This is both the plot of the film *300*, which was released not long ago, and a real scene from world history.

Although the film *300* surely exaggerated the story considerably, this episode clearly shows the core of ancient Sparta’s public education system. Once Spartan men reached a certain age, they were taken from their parents and placed entirely under state control, where they all received the same military training. They were constantly indoctrinated with the idea that the individual must sacrifice himself for the state and the nation, and their lives were controlled by the government.

Yet Athens, though also a Greek city-state, was strikingly different. Whereas Sparta’s education was thoroughly public education, Athens’ education was private education. Each family took responsibility for its own children’s schooling. As a result, the content of education was completely different as well.

While Spartan education bore a strong totalitarian character that placed the whole above the individual, private education in Athens focused mainly on cultivating rational thinking and creativity. It is no coincidence that democracy flourished in Athens. While Sparta taught people to solve problems with their fists, Athens taught the fundamentals of democracy: dialogue and compromise.

Modern public education emerged along with the rise of the modern nation-state. Public education under state control was created to turn people of diverse backgrounds into citizens of a single nation. And it is true that public education played a major role in national integration. Korea, too, has long emphasized the role of the state in education, through institutions such as the Gukjagam and Sungkyunkwan.

However, public education carries a number of drawbacks. As Mises said, in most cases it inevitably becomes education that instills the ideology of those who control it. Educational content also tends to drift toward what is easier for teachers to teach and easier to evaluate, rather than the knowledge students actually need to live in the world after graduation.

The era we are entering places greater importance on the individual than the collective, and on creativity than loyalty. Educational content, too, should not be uniformly imposed by the state, but should be chosen by students and parents according to their own needs. Education, too, now requires consumer choice and competition among providers.

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Original title: [학교이야기] 300에 비친 공교육

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2008-06-30

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=18&idx=10710