What is the purpose of education? To answer that question we can just look at our own lifes, or at least I assume that most of us enjoyed at least some education, for most of us it will be some sort of publicly funded, and for some a privately funded education.
Image by sunilkargwal - source: Pixabay
Public schooling is seen as one of the greatest achievements of modern western society. Free and even compulsory education for everyone seems like a good idea, and even necessary because without critically thinking individuals who are able to understand and perform their role in a working democracy, there wouldn't be a democracy. If we, the people, don't understand what our politicians are talking about, we would be voting on trustworthy faces and reassuring voices instead of the actual content of their programs; we would never vote in our own interest, unless by chance...
Oh wait. That's exactly where we are now; we almost always vote against our own interest. We vote by what our politicians say during campaings, not by what they actually do when they're not campaigning. And that's in large part because of the educational system; school makes us not independently and critically thinking citizens, but mindlessly obeying sheep. We learn to listen to, obey, and regurgitate the information given to us by a superior. We learn to listen to the school bell that indicates when we're allowed to take a beak from the regurgitation-game withing previously set confounds, like the school-square. Public schooling was born together with the first industrial revolution, and like all institutions has the singular goal of creating a population in service of the industrial economy.
Comedian George Carlin, may he rest in peace, said it best:
"...there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. [...] You have no choice. You have owners. [...] They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money."
source: Goodreads
When we're prepared to blindly accept anything thrown at us by our intellectual "superiors" in school, mainstream media takes over the role of keeping us passive and obedient. We're fed the information that the corporate upper class deems conducive to keep the existing power structure intact. Much of that is diversion; steer the public's attention away from the real cause of their economic hardship and the real reason why democracy just doesn't seem to work as promised in school. I stumbled upon this video, and it explains exactly how this works in my opinion. I hope you find it educational ;-)
Why Public Schools and the Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down
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