As Washington gears up to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), you can expect to hear a lot of over-the top-rhetoric. “NCLB is working.” “The law is underfunded.” Things like that.

And then there’s this gem uttered yesterday by President Bush:

It’s really important for the citizens to understand that I’m a huge believer in the public school systems. I believe our public schools have really made America.

Now, a lot of the crazy rhetoric we’re going to be subjected to during reauthorization is going to need refutation, but let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Public schooling — especially the super-centralized, big-government public schooling enshrined in NCLB — did NOT make America. That is a myth that’s been perpetuated to prop up failed public schooling for far too long, and it’s about time people stopped putting up with it.

As I discuss at some length in Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict, and Marie Gryphon explains in detail in Our History of Educational Freedom: What It Should Mean for Families Today, public schooling imposed from above is not how education was delivered in America until relatively recently. During the nation’s colonial and Founding periods — when the United States was literally made — education was delivered almost exclusively through private and voluntary means and it worked very well. Indeed, that was the case until almost the end of the nineteenth century, when the progressive movement finally started closing the door on parental freedom and imposing centralized control over education.

And that’s when things started to really go downhill.

Centralizing control of education at higher and higher levels, and forcing all Americans to support public schooling with their tax dollars, has spurred constant fighting and done nothing to improve educational outcomes. Whether it’s been battles over the teaching of human origins, prayer in schools, multiculturalism, book-banning, sex education, phonics and whole language, or numerous other issues, government schooling has divided Americans while simultaneously giving government officials and bureaucrats a virtual, suffocating monopoly over American education.

What really built America is something quite the opposite of compulsory, centralized public schooling. Freedom — not big government — is what built this nation, rewarding hard work, driving innovation, attracting millions of immigrants to our shores, and unifying diverse ethnic and religious groups through their common desires for liberty and prosperity.

Freedom is what really built America, and it’s time that people stopped giving public schooling credit for its success.