Education is like gardening. Like all objective truths, this isn’t a new idea, but it’s become increasingly forgotten. In place of what we once knew to be true, many have been tricked into believing a particularly dangerous sort of folly: that schooling is a kind of manufacturing operation. Today, a child is seen as a “product.” Since this “product” has the potential to reshape the world, exerting immense control over a child’s education is a way to control the future.

The public education bureaucracy controls the future by regulating everything that happens in the schools. It begins with requiring that teachers have specific certifications, which seems appropriate on its surface, but certification is mostly concerned about how to teach instead of the subject mastery required to teach well. The bureaucracy’s rules for “how to teach” have become so onerous that the collective bargaining agreements for public school teachers in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles detail these classroom regulations and are hundreds of pages long.