This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 4th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Just how American are public schools and how American are the impulses that created them.

Is the private provision of education really that un-American?

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom,

says public schools, along with the conflicts they create, should be privatized.

We are a nation of immigrants largely, and it's popularly believed that because we have all these diverse people who have

come to this country ethnically diverse religiously diverse philosophically diverse, religiously diverse, philosophically diverse.

What we've needed is something that unifies us, that teaches us all how to be proper Americans

to believe, proper American belief belief to accept American values and freedom

and democracy and the public schools were set up as an institution that was supposed to

take all these people and essentially

teach them how to be Americans to get along and to properly exercise freedom.

And the belief is that only a single system of education can do this, can take these disparate people who might not have had any experience with democracy or freedom

and teach them how to use those things properly and responsibly.

And millions of people, obviously, over the years and millions of

millions of immigrants have gone through the public schools,

and so it's believed, look, this is what's

taking these people and made them into good Americans.

Well, the argument is, essentially, that this creates a greater sense of

common experience for diverse groups. It teaches them how to be better citizens.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, they were essentially considered to be assimilation factories, but nice assimilation factories where people go or went and they were taught how to be in Americans in very pleasant ways and that really just allowed them and enabled them and empowered them to embrace freedom and democracy.

Well, what's the root of the idea that schools should be treated as assimilation factories

...