Can we afford utopian education?

Public Education

Yesterday, I ran across a somewhat too-hagiographic piece on social media attributing the beginning of publicly funded education in the USA to Robert Dale Owen, a guy who had been involved in some failed utopian projects:

Robert Dale Owen (born Nov. 9, 1801, Glasgow, Scot.—died June 24, 1877, Lake George, N.Y., U.S.) was an American social reformer and politician. The son of the English reformer Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen was steeped in his father’s socialist philosophy while growing up at New Lanark in Scotland—the elder Owen’s model industrial community. In 1825, father and son immigrated to the United States to set up another self-sufficient socialist community at New Harmony, Ind.

Robert Dale Owen edited the community’s newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette, until 1827, when he became associated with the controversial reformer Fanny Wright. They traveled together to Wright’s experimental community of Nashoba, Tenn., which was dedicated to the education and gradual emancipation of slaves, and from there went on to Europe.

Upon returning to the United States, Owen and Wright revisited the Nashoba and New Harmony communities, then in a state of decay. They settled in New York, where Owen edited the Free Enquirer. The paper opposed evangelical religion and advocated more liberal divorce laws, more equal distribution of wealth, and widespread industrial education; it was at the centre of radical free thought in New York. For two years, Owen, with Wright and other radicals, sought to turn the New York Workingmen’s Party away from Thomas Skidmore’s belief in an equal division of property. They successfully ousted Skidmore, but later their own program of social reform through public education was also repudiated.

After a brief trip to England in 1832, Owen returned to New Harmony. He served three terms in the Indiana legislature (1836–183, where he advocated the allocation of government funds for public schools, and two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he introduced the bill creating the Smithsonian Institution. . .

He didn't stop there in his efforts to reform society, but concerning his involvement in how the Smithsonian was set up:

There was literally a Bolshevik takeover of the Smithsonian.

Democrats can never be allowed to take power again. https://t.co/obrrITrpda pic.twitter.com/nMQyUJSRNG

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 8, 2026

Higher Education in the Past

Neither of the the Wright Brothers graduated from high school yet they had enough knowledge of mathematics to build all of the formulas that formed the science of aeronautics. https://t.co/uQkRMSiaZb

— varifrank (@varifrank) July 11, 2026

And:

YOU REALLY NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST:

The story behind the New York Times' 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks.

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed "experts" mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.

So, how do we help young people in the Day of AI?

No more take-home tests

I wonder what fraction of these students hail from a culture with an elaborate & institutionalized millennia-long tradition of cheating on standardized tests https://t.co/fFl54YELIw

— Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) July 10, 2026

No more Bolshevik professors, either

Angela Davis bought a shotgun. Two days later her friends took a courtroom hostage and secured that gun to a judge’s head using duct tape

In the hostage standoff, they blew the judge’s head off. She was arrested in connection

This is why Angela Davis is famous https://t.co/PKmPXH9g0l

— Joshua D Phillips (@JoshPhillipsPhD) July 10, 2026

WEEKEND

The Week In Pictures: Goodbye, Nazi Edition

The week began with Independence Day, and it featured a lot of World Cup action. If you can call anything that happens in soccer action. Europe sweltered under a non-air conditioned heat wave, and the Iran conflict resumed. But what motivated meme-makers more than anything else was the spectacular implosion of the Graham Platner Senate campaign. I suppose because it was so unexpected: who would have imagined that the campaign of a Nazi-tattooed Communist would come to grief?

Music

Jay and the Americans

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, Happy 250th Anniversary!

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Notable comment:

165 Dear America, Happy 250th Birthday!

I'm Canadian and, unlike far too many up here, I think the USA is the best neighbor and friend any country could ask for.

I wish I could have crashed the party 'cause it looks like everyone who is not a lefty is having a blast.

Posted by: all doubt removed at July 04, 2026 01:25 PM