# Abolition + PickingCrops↵ ↵ ThisCrops↵ ↵ > % source: Bertram Cooper, *Mad Men* season 7, episode 2: ‘A Day’s Work’ (2014)↵ > % link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3wM71VDhLkw↵ > Well, I’m all for the advancement of colored people, but I do not believe they should advance all the way to the front of this office.↵ ↵ This is a satirical rebuttal of Bryan Caplan’s article [‘Unschooling + Math’](https://www.econlib.org/unschooling-math/). I want to showcase how his article reads to me. Imagine that a slaveholder from the early 1860s wrote the following.31 unchanged lines collapsedI hope my article shows that Caplan is a tyrant who has no idea what freedom means. He presents himself as someone who cares about freedom, as this reasonable guy who wants a balanced approach, but his primary concern isn’t freedom at all. Instead, he wants to *grant* freedom on *his* terms: do math for 2 hours and he will grant you freedom for the rest of the day. He wants to prescribe predefined goals and assuage parents’ guilt for using coercion. His concern for *parents’ guilt* rather than *children’s freedom* betrayshim.↵ ↵ Overridinghim. If someone from the 1860s had concern for the guilt slaveholders felt for whipping their slaves, you’d immediately know whose side they were on, no matter how much they pretended to care about freedom.↵ ↵ Overriding a child’s preferences for his benefit is a contradiction in terms. If learning math is such a good idea, persuade your child. If you fail, then not learning math is his prerogative, just like it is yours not to pick crops, even though people in the 1860s considered it an extremely useful skill. Or learn math later in life. Free people will naturally learn whatever math their own unique problem situation requires, when it requires it, and the scope and timing is going to be different for everyone. The reason most people don’t do that today is that teachers ruin their relationship with math basically forever: a self-fulfilling prophecy. And their only way to assert their freedom is to reject math. Freedom is indivisible and allows absolutely no compromises. You cannot balance freedom: it’s all or nothing. There are better and worse forms of slavery, but only one type of freedom. Caplan is a good example of the Randian insight that [even the smallest compromise on basic principles or moral matters is a complete surrender](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html). An honest man who steals once in a while is not an honest man, as Ayn Rand implied. A free man who has to pick crops 1-2 hours a day is not a free man. A free child who has to learn math 1-2 hours a day is not a free child. The whole point of unschooling is (or should be!) freedom, not productivity or career choices or “merits” or whatever. Mix unschooling and forced math lessons and you end up with no unschooling at all.
Abolition + Picking Crops
Well, I’m all for the advancement of colored people, but I do not believe they should advance all the way to the front of this office.
This is a satirical rebuttal of Bryan Caplan’s article ‘Unschooling + Math’. I want to showcase how his article reads to me. Imagine that a slaveholder from the early 1860s wrote the following.
31 unchanged lines collapsed
I hope my article shows that Caplan is a tyrant who has no idea what freedom means. He presents himself as someone who cares about freedom, as this reasonable guy who wants a balanced approach, but his primary concern isn’t freedom at all. Instead, he wants to grant freedom on his terms: do math for 2 hours and he will grant you freedom for the rest of the day. He wants to prescribe predefined goals and assuage parents’ guilt for using coercion. His concern for parents’ guilt rather than children’s freedom betrays him. If someone from the 1860s had concern for the guilt slaveholders felt for whipping their slaves, you’d immediately know whose side they were on, no matter how much they pretended to care about freedom.
Overriding a child’s preferences for his benefit is a contradiction in terms. If learning math is such a good idea, persuade your child. If you fail, then not learning math is his prerogative, just like it is yours not to pick crops, even though people in the 1860s considered it an extremely useful skill. Or learn math later in life. Free people will naturally learn whatever math their own unique problem situation requires, when it requires it, and the scope and timing is going to be different for everyone. The reason most people don’t do that today is that teachers ruin their relationship with math basically forever: a self-fulfilling prophecy. And their only way to assert their freedom is to reject math.Freedom is indivisible and allows absolutely no compromises. You cannot balance freedom: it’s all or nothing. There are better and worse forms of slavery, but only one type of freedom. Caplan is a good example of the Randian insight that even the smallest compromise on basic principles or moral matters is a complete surrender. An honest man who steals once in a while is not an honest man, as Ayn Rand implied. A free man who has to pick crops 1-2 hours a day is not a free man. A free child who has to learn math 1-2 hours a day is not a free child. The whole point of unschooling is (or should be!) freedom, not productivity or career choices or “merits” or whatever. Mix unschooling and forced math lessons and you end up with no unschooling at all.