Dr. Thompson on "The New Abolitionism: On Separating School and State"
What role should the State play in educating America's children? Are government schools compatible with a free society? Is it possible to have a free-market in education? In addressing these questions, Dr. Brad Thompson will examine the destructive role played by "public" education in America; he will critique the principal assumptions behind government schooling (e.g., that children have a "right" to an education and that government schools are for the "public good"); and he will call for the abolition of all government schools. Dr. Thompson will present a principled argument for a free-market in education that begins with the rights and responsibilities of parents to provide for the education of their own children.Dr. Thompson also spoke at University of Colorado at Boulder on "Our Killing Schools" on October 5th.
C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.
Professor Thompson is the author of John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, winner of the 1999 American Political Science Association prize for "best first book in political theory." He has also edited The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader and he was an associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Professor Thompson is currently completing a book on "The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism."
Dr. Thompson is also an occasional writer for The Times Literary Supplement of London and a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. His essay on "The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism" appears in the current issue of The Objective Standard. He has lectured around the country on education reform and his op-ed essays have appeared in scores of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Thompson's lectures on the political thought of John Adams have twice appeared on C-SPAN.