Why public schools don’t teach Mises, Rothbard, or Spooner

Public schools rob your kid from the day they step into kindergarten. They’re fed state-sanitized slop that protects government interests.

Here’s the deal: kids can spend twelve years in a government-run school, then four more at a government-accredited university, and never once hear the names Mises, Rothbard, Spooner, Hayek, or Bastiat. The greats who exposed the state for what it is — a parasite on productive society — are erased from the syllabus.

And that’s no accident.

The price tag of omission

In my parents’ district, the cost per student is $12,400 a year. Think about that. Twelve grand per kid. And for what? For a system that won’t even whisper the names of thinkers who challenged the legitimacy of the state.

If a private service charged you twelve grand and left out the most important parts of the subject, you’d call it fraud. But because the state stamps, seals, and approves it, people nod along and pay their property taxes like good little citizens.

Public schooling’s always been about managed ignorance.

Why the state hides its critics

The Incentive Problem: Public schools are tax-funded, bureaucratic-driven state institutions beholden to unions. Why would they promote people like Rothbard, who called taxation theft?

Or Spooner, who dismantled the Constitution as a “dead letter”? If kids actually read these thinkers, they might start questioning the system writing their lesson plans.

Central Planning vs. Spontaneous Order: Mises and Hayek obliterated the myth of central planning. They showed that knowledge is dispersed, individuals cooperating voluntarily beat bureaucracy every time. Imagine dropping Human Action into a high school econ class.

Kids might start asking why the public education system is one giant failed monopoly.

The Curriculum Cartel: Academics and policymakers who owe their careers to the state dominate committees that approve what’s taught.

Their worldview depends on the fib that government intervention is noble, necessary, and inevitable. Including Rothbard or Bastiat would threaten these committees.

The Power of Omission: Totalitarian regimes rewrite history outright. Democracies just leave inconvenient voices out. Nobody has to burn Mises’ books if students never hear his name in the first place.

Most graduates walk away none the wiser, believing their “education” was comprehensive when in reality it was curated propaganda.

My red pill — and Satu Viiminen’s

Here’s a fun fact: Satu Viiminen’s “red pill” moment in Cursed Mage — realizing her school erased dissenting voices — was also mine.

Back in 2011, an economics teacher mentioned Mises and Rothbard in a positive light. I started digging, and once I did, the mask slipped. The state doesn’t tell its own story honestly, because it can’t.

I’ve since heard the same story from countless others. A professor slipped up, a YouTube lecture appeared in the algorithm, or a friend dropped the right book recommendation.

Soon, everything about their “education” looked like indoctrination.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Public schools can’t afford to teach kids about Mises and Rothbard

So why don’t public schools teach Mises, Rothbard, or Spooner? Because the state doesn’t finance its own destruction. It doesn’t train its captives to break the chains.

You don’t get $12,400 a year worth of education. You get $12,400 worth of conditioning.

The good news? The state can’t stop the truth from leaking out.

The thinkers they erased are still there, waiting for anyone who bothers to look. And once you’ve found them, you realize the real education never came from a government classroom.

In my own books, one of my protagonists, Yote Diamondback, will learn this fact once she completes her last days at Kenborne, a prep school for Elementals following the same blueprint as a public school.

She gets red-pilled in my free novella, Arcane Awakenings, after an experience she won’t soon forget. Find out how and why Yote swallowed that red pill.