Think It Through

In an article on James Scott's new book Two Cheers for Anarchy, Lucy Steigerwald writes:

He points to the 101st Airborne's role in integrating Little Rock schools to refute the notion that a state can never be used to protect individuals.

In most of his discussions of the modern world, though, Scott sounds like an anarchist again. He detests public schooling, for example: not just in this post–No Child Left Behind, standardized test–heavy era (and not just in Jim Crow Little Rock), but in general. Public schools, he writes, were developed to create good, hard-working citizens "whose loyalty to the nation will trump regional and local identities of language, ethnicity, and religion."

That's a sweet, sweet juxtaposition. Why? Because if we could do away with public schools, as the Scott of the second paragraph would like, then the government in the first paragraph would never have had the legitimacy to force integration of the schools.