“The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” – H.L. Mencken

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This quote is noted in “A Second Mencken Chrestomathy,” as initially published by Mencken in 1921. The Sage of Baltimore offered this work revised and annotated nearly 50 years after his death. He called things as he saw them, and most of the time, and all of these years later, we would be hard-pressed to find him wrong in many of his pronouncements. Hypocrisy was seen as a capital offense. Mencken is not wrong in this finding.

In a sense, Mencken was a libertarian who distrusted anything that encroached on liberty. The greatest threat was called out in the way government often forces conformity. Dissent was and is to be tolerated as a necessity of thinking. Real education directs itself toward differentiating between workable bits of information serving as facts and the appearances of such facts. Public schools were and are faulty in teaching thinking over presenting information in a one-sided manner. In this manner, at its best, it is a form of propaganda meant to produce good citizens accepting of authority.

Mencken believed that people who received education stopping at the “Three Rs” were more self-reliant, cynical, liberty-loving, and willing to stand up for their individual beliefs. He was perhaps not very wrong in this view. Schools must emphasize critical thinking instead of mass producing a herd of sheep. The problems faced today require such thinking skills and will not lessen in the future. People’s ability to have notions of their own was Mencken’s goal. The world would be better off if we strove for this goal. This is how we find our way toward better lifetimes lived by all, even when some ideas disagree with our own, as they must.