Parenting & Family Quote by Benjamin Tucker

A lot of political arguments about children are really arguments about who gets to manufacture the next generation. Tucker’s line is a scalpel aimed at that machinery. He’s not defending the sentimental “family values” version of childhood; he’s attacking institutional custody as a pipeline for ideology. By rejecting both the “communistic nursery” of State Socialists and the existing “communistic school system,” Tucker collapses what his opponents want to keep separate: the claim that today’s public schooling is “neutral” while only future socialist childcare would be “collectivist.” In his view, the collectivism is already here; it just wears the badge of normalcy.

The intent is to draw a bright boundary around the child as a site of autonomy rather than a public resource. Tucker’s anarchism is allergic to the idea that the State (or a state-like collective) can legitimately standardize upbringing. The subtext is a suspicion that compulsory systems don’t merely educate; they produce compliance, habits, and loyalties. “Rearing” is doing a lot of work: it’s about culture reproduction, not just literacy.

Context matters. Late 19th-century America was building mass public education alongside anxieties about immigrants, industrial discipline, and social unrest. Schools were explicitly civic projects, training future workers and citizens. Tucker, a market-oriented individualist anarchist, hears that as soft coercion: tax-funded, compulsory, homogenizing. His jab at “communistic” schooling is less a Red Scare than a rhetorical inversion, turning the mainstream system into the collectivist experiment it pretends not to be.