Public Schooling, Indoctrination, and Totalitarianism

Governments use public education and public ownership of the media to control the information that their citizens receive. More totalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth transfers make greater investments in publicly controlled information. This finding is borne out from cross‐sectional time‐series evidence acros countries and is confirmed when the recent fall of communism is specifically examined. My results reject the standard publicagood view linking education and democracy, and I find evidence that public educational expenditures vary in similar ways to government ownership of television stations. Country‐level data on the organization of families as well as data on South African public schools are also examined.