It seems that education is not about teaching kids to think, but teaching
them to think as those in power want them to.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] What's education really about?
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
Ed
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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