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CounterPunch
February
24, 2003
Programming the Work Force
The Failure
of Mass Education
by CHARLES SULLIVAN
What are our public schools but an instrument
of the state? Our students are not taught the skills of critical
thinking that would serve them well as citizens in a free society
for the entirety of their lives. Mass education focuses upon
memorization and scoring well on exams. Our schools do not promote
independent thought or independent actions--they teach conformity
and control of the masses. Every student is taught virtually
the same thing in essentially the same way--much of it untrue;
especially history and economics. Our students are not educated
to become useful and creative members of society; they are programmed
to be unquestioning conformists and mindless consumers of goods
and propaganda. Thus we are creating a society of automatons
who will never challenge authority, who will behave predictably
and will be staunch defenders of the status quo. In other words,
they will become the passive core of American Society.
The state is thus assured that the vast
majority of our youth will never make trouble and will never
pose a serious threat to power. They are raising a crop of non-creative
robots that will always do what they are told without question.
Most of these students will buy into the American dream, only
to find it elusive when the end of life draws near. They will
work hard at jobs that drain their spirit of life and vitality,
most of them earning little more than subsistence wages, many
of them at multiple jobs. I know much of this only too well through
my own experience and personal failures.
The idea of measuring the progress of
millions of individual students by subjecting them to standardized
tests is absurd. This doest not measure the progress made by
the student; it measures the progress made by the system. Our
schools are really factories of mass production where the object
isn't to educate and inform, but to produce a homogenous culture
of non-thinking conformists and consumers. The finished product
is like a fast food hamburger from McDonald's. It's uniformly
the same no matter where you buy it from.
Thoreau said, "Education makes a
straight ditch of a free meandering brook." Schools are
effective institutions for controlling the masses. It is no coincidence
that they closely resemble the factory system in their methods
of production. A homogenous population is easier to control than
a diverse, free thinking population. A critical thinking society
is downright dangerous to the rule of those in power. I doubt
whether this is done by conscious design; but nevertheless the
results speak for themselves.
There are just enough free thinking non-conformists
among us to innovate and to move society slowly forward. The
most important changes never occur at the center of society--they
occur on the radical fringes. This is the place where people
still ask relevant questions, examine historical events critically
and speak with candor about them. It is where the risk takers
are. It is the sphere where people refuse to believe what they
are told without question; a place where people refuse to conform
for the sake of conformity. It is the sphere from which our greatest
citizens have always come.
One of the greatest benefits to the corporations
that run the country is that they receive not only an easily
controlled work force, but also a work force that takes orders
well and does what it is told without question. Business requires
conformity more than it needs innovation. And most of the innovation
that we have in this corporate oligarchy is to improve the methods
of mass production of goods. These innovations are rarely purely
scientific or humanitarian in nature--they are for the improvement
of the bottom line.
The system of education in our schools
tends to be self policing. It not only demands conformity, it
openly disdains radical thought and dissent. If you think differently
and behave differently from the multitudes you will be labeled
as 'different'; you will be viewed with suspicion and contempt.
You will be seen as an oddity, scorned by your fellow classmates.
If you are different enough from the masses and these traits
persist into adulthood, you might even fall under the surveillance
of the FBI and be targeted as an enemy of the state or a terrorist.
When you are targeted for imprisonment or assassination, you
know you have reached the pinnacle of success.
The mass education system in the US exists
primarily for the benefit of business. The advantages to business
are that they have a constant supply of inexpensive semi-skilled
and skilled labor that can be easily exploited.
The curriculum that is taught in our
public schools comes from a perspective that is very favorable
to business and commerce. It is by nature exclusionary to contrarian
views. This way of teaching portrays capitalism in the most favorable
light possible. It gives an especially fanciful rendition of
history that bears little resemblance to reality or fact.
The great people that have emerged at
the forefront of our society are there not because of the educational
system but in spite of it. They are the exception, not the norm.
Some of these people include: June Jordan, Noam Chomsky, Howard
Zinn, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Cynthia McKinney, Malcolm
X, Tim Hermach, Ambrose Lane, William Blum and Amy Goodman, to
name a few. Yet society has benefited immensely from the courage
and wisdom of a small minority of its citizens. We are better
as a culture because of contributions to society made by these
critical thinking people. And if our public education were structured
differently, these people might be the norm rather than the exception.
Imagine what might be possible if we had a system of education
that produced thousands more of these people every decade or
so instead of only a dozen or so.
Of course it is not in the self interest
of capitalism to educate people who can see capitalism for what
it is, to think critically about it, and perhaps even do something
to change it. Corporate education exists to promote programming
consumers and providing an obedient work force to an unfair slave
wage system, not to provide society with a well informed and
politically active citizenry. In fact these are the things that
pose the greatest threat to America's corporate oligarchy.
The continued programming of malleable
young minds for the purpose of promoting capitalism paves the
way for a poorly informed, passive society capable of believing
any lie, accepting any atrocity and calling it liberation, democracy
or justice--calling it anything but what it really is. If we
are ever to have a peaceful and just society that values the
contributions of its citizens equally, we have to begin by first
educating ourselves and then our youth. Self deceit does not
work in the public interest. It never has.
Charles Sullivan
is a veteran wild forest activist, writer and cabinetmaker who
resides on twenty acres of land in the rural countryside of West
Virginia.
He can be reached at: cesullivan@stargate.net
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