Ed,
Chomsky is right in saying that public education was set up for
indoctrination purposes. In the 1860s, Count von Bismark in Germany
was the first to dip his toes into it when he started free schools
for the sons of his officer class. This ensured that he'd have a
further fully conditioned, loyal generation of army officers. He then
realized that if he could extend free education more widely he could
indoctrinate a whole generation of boys as willing army conscripts if
and when he needed them. He did this by bribing the parents with free
health insurance and old age pensions.
Meanwhile something was happening in England that was very disturbing
to our government. In the 1860s/70s, factory workers in the big
manufacturing cities such as Manchester were actually paying for
their children to be educated in order to get them out of the factory
trap. (There were some free charity schools but nowhere near enough.)
Fees of two or three pennies a week were very low -- they had to be
-- but a good basic education in maths and English was achieved by
the age of 11 or 12 (fully equivalent to the literacy and numeracy
standards of today at 13/14). This was economically feasible by the
monitor method (otherwise known as the 'Victorian' method -- still
widely practised in private schools in India, rural China, Africa and
elsewhere). One (paid) teacher would teach a small number of the
older and brightest children in an early morning session and then
they would each take a class and re-teach the same lesson to the
other children. The government didn't like this and set up large
numbers of their own schools with smaller fees than the private
schools. This didn't succeed so fees were lowered further in a second
attempt. This didn't succeed either. It was only then that state
schools became entirely free and the monitor schools disappeared. It
was then that we started to have full-blown nationalistic
indoctrination -- with the obligatory world map on the classroom wall
showing the British Empire in red, marching drills in the
playgrounds, etc, . It was no wonder that young men were so
jingoistic that they volunteered in their hundreds of thousands at
the outbreak of WWI in order to fight the conscripted (but equally
gung-ho) German regiments. (But not for too long. When word of the
terrible conditions came back from the battle-fronts, and of the
largely stupid aristocratic officer class, then volunteering dropped
away rapidly and even the British had to be conscripted. [We also
know now that in the last year or two of the war, both the British
and the German soldier had by then realized that they'd both been
conned and were actually fighting the battles of their top social
classes. They quickly learned not to kill their opposite numbers,
unless forced to by a nearby officer. On Xmas Day 1917 British and
German soldiers actually played football matches and shared food
parcels and fags. Both sides also learned how to hang back a bit
whenever the lower-ranking officers led them out of the trenches into
bayonet charges. The rate of officer mortality among the younger
officers was even higher than in the ordinary ranks. The se nior
officers never went anywhere near the front-lines, of course.
{Occasionally -- as in the Vietnam War -- the ordinary ranks would
shoot the more obnoxious or enthusiastic of their own officers.} ] )
Keith
At 14:44 06/04/2012, Ed wrote:
Chomsky's take on the purposes of the education system:
<http://www.alternet.org/story/154849/chomsky%3A_how_the_young_are_indoctrinated_to_obey?akid=8536.1074389.gTEx0n&rd=1&t=5>http://www.alternet.org/story/154849/chomsky%3A_how_the_young_are_indoctrinated_to_obey?akid=8536.1074389.gTEx0n&rd=1&t=5
Ed
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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