Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 3: The State Controls You

The lessons of Authoritarian School build on each other, just as you might expect of any cold mathematics. The first and second lessons reveal how the state teaches every child that it provides for them and knows better than they do what they should do with their lives. We shall now see how damaging the government schooling program can be. Every generation put through its mental grinder emerges without the creativity and independence that would make for a better world. But that independence, while valuable for society, is dangerous to the state, and must be systematically crushed.

The Third Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state controls you. It can kidnap your children for hours each day. During that time it provides a structured environment that teaches learned helplessness and dependence on authority.

This lesson has a stark effect on both the children and the adults, nobody escapes its pressures. Through mandatory attendance laws, the state restricts learning opportunities to institutions that it controls and administers. Today, adults go along with these laws because, having been through school themselves, they can envision no alternatives. They are taught as children the first two lessons in a state-controlled environment and grow up to think that mass kidnapping is somehow OK, and even for their own good.

Wendy Priesnitz

The mere fact that most school attendance is compulsory reflects an attitude of mistrust of children and their desire to make sense of the world. In fact, if governments were really serious about their professed goal of developing, nurturing, and enhancing the intellectual and moral autonomy of the young, would they not have to abolish compulsory, externally imposed education?

I want to say that they give up their children because they fear the men with guns, but the reality is far more insidious. The kidnapping is mostly voluntary. But it takes some explanation to reveal the mental damage behind this poor choice.

Think back to your experience in school, and what you remember most from it. I'd wager the majority of your time spent could be summarized in one word: boredom.

Wendy Priesnitz

One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn't know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called 'learned incompetency' and a fear of not being able to do things 'right' the first time.

Ivan Illich

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

The structure of the classroom wreaks an incalculable damage on entire generations. The lessons are arranged to hand out the tiniest morsels of knowledge. The state controls the rate of learning and sets it at the lowest common denominator.

Wendy Priesnitz

Because schools suffocate children's hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.

And the contrived appearance of difficulty convinces children and adults alike that they need the state to tell them what to do and how to think. Not coincidentally, once children have been starved of their intrinsic motivation for learning and exploring, they stop trying to do so. Inquisitive minds are destroyed by the regimented classrooms. Instead of practicing discovery the brightest minds either invent ways to entertain themselves, both productive and destructive, or they start playing the waiting game.

Wendy Priesnitz

The force-feeding process of schooling is so relentless that many students gag on it. They tune out or leave school, and in some cases, become permanently soured on learning.

Jean Piaget

When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.

John Holt

Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, the independent scientist in the child disappears.

Students may be embittered by the experience while young, but are numbed by the time they graduate. Then, as parents, they think that this hideous, taxatious system of indoctrinations is the only way to learn. Even as they recognize, in the workplace, that they use hardly a fraction of what they still remember. Far better to build skills valued in the economy through vocational apprenticeship.

Seymour Papert

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization…I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

There can only be one conclusion about state education: It kidnaps children to train them to obey orders from uniformed police and smug politicians.

Sandra Dodd

Some people can't leave school because they're carrying it around like a snail and his shell. They live there, still. School became an ingrown, hard part of them. They still define themselves by their school failures and successes.

Wendy Priesnitz

Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, and to buy what we were offered.

So the state schooling system not only manufactures a willing compliance among the populace, but it simultaneously and systematically destroys self-initiative and robs the world of a great many explorers and potential scientists.

Agatha Christie

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.

This loss affects us all, and in an incalculable way. I cannot begin to imagine how much more we might have in this world: more ideas, more efficient production, more inventive media, more imaginative entertainment. Fortunately for the state, this lost opportunity cost is unmeasurable. Otherwise, people would never have allowed it.

H. L. Mencken

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

When the self-educated put it to task (the school's inculcates are taught to never ask), the state claims that this lost economy is the price we must pay to have an orderly society.

Laurie A. Couture

Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created 'dangerous', free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.

I call bullshit on the state's claims.

John Taylor Gatto

I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.