At 14:03 07/04/2012, you wrote:
It seems that education is not about teaching kids to think, but
teaching them to think as those in power want them to.
Ed,
Exactly. I think this has always applied. In England the schools of
the early and middle Middle Ages (those we now call grammar schools
in this country) were set up either for the boys (no schoolgirls in
those days!) to sing daily masses (twice a day) for the dead souls of
the rich and/or to prepare them as obedient apprentices for the
closed shop trades of the town guilds. (My old school was one of
these. The boys were fed atrociously. One boy in the 15th century
stole a sheep and was hanged in the town square.) The monasteries in
those days were also on the look-out for suitable boys to
indoctrinate as future monks (and for sexual purposes no doubt).
Fortunately children are not quite 100% credulous. There are always a
few mavericks who are awkward enough to become interested in learning
for its own sake.
Keith
----- 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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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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