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.

Las Vegas

The Admiral in on holiday in the city of voluntary lost wages and enjoying himself immensely. The planned post on education will have to wait until the Admiral has either imbibed so much that he cannot contain his conviction on the criminality of state education or until he is sober enough to operate a keyboard properly.

Celebrate Secession

Today, the Admiral has to battle traffic on his way to celebrate the outcome of the American War of Insurrection. Being an anarchist, the Admiral is a strong fan of secession, and supports all groups around the world that wish to go their own way. Simply try to imagine, if you would, how small government (all governments!) would be if taxation were replaced with voluntary donation?

The ability to withdraw your financial consent is the most powerful check against abuse. So on this Fourth of July, even if you are not American, find a company, organization, or even just an individual, that behaves in a way that you strongly disagree with, and boycott them. Financially re-arrange your life so that you no longer support their behavior. For your ability to go your own way, to opt out, to defect, to leave, to quit, to defect, is the true power of anarchy, for it's the most powerful way to communicate your dissatisfaction.

Liberty on the Rocks, Summary of Discussion

So, I went to the Liberty on the Rocks event in Casey's Irish Pub in Downtown LA, and had a rousing bout of discussion. Naturally, the other attendees (about 15 of them, the largest crowd for this group so far) were mostly Libertarian. I did connect with some anarchists, and those who are almost anarchist, but wish not to use that label to avoid stigma.

I met a socially charming woman who studies law. She's more minarchist and thought that its a good thing we have a centralized system of Law and Order. I've been there believing the same thing myself, because top-down-tree organization with precedence is just so... right, so organized. The mental model is so natural. Plus the many years of learning state-based law in a state-sanctioned school. I think she may never have discussed alternative systems, and automatically assumed that without a court-of-last-resort, it would be anarchy! I cannot blame her for this neatness fetish, for I used to have it myself (and still do in some areas).

But then, about a year and a half to two years ago, I ran into some videos by David Friedman and learned about polycentric law. And found out that competing legal systems have so much more flexibility. And I don't mean that a judge gets to make up arbitrary rulings, because they would certainly lose their clientele, and fail in the legal market. Rather, I mean it in the sense that the laws no longer restricted to appeal to precedent. So rulings can adapt to cultural norms and expectations of the legal combatants.

Pretty much everyone there agreed that the government isn't needed for roads! And Andrew, the newly self-appointed organizer for the Liberty on the Rocks gathering for Orange County, gave me a neat joke: "What's the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist?" "About six months."

I did meet some detractors, who think that anarchism is untenable or unstable. That it wouldn't work unless everyone thought that way because all it takes is for one guy to raise an army, push people around, and take over. It's a legitimate fear, that I think David Friendman adequately addresses. But, even if events turn out that way, Anarchy is still worth a try anyhow. Because it's worst outcome is what we have today: Government, and that's a TAX.

Liberty on the Rocks

Today the Admiral will be attending Liberty on The Rocks in Los Angeles, where he will meet with others of like mind and we shall all freely indulge in some merry libation. A full declaration of the liberated mind and loosened tongue will be posted afterward.

Then, provided the dehydration of sobriety doesn't desiccate my squidly typing appendages, I'll continue with the Authoritarian Schooling Lessons.

Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 2: The State Knows Better than You

In the previous lesson, I simply showed how the state monopolization of Education makes my anarchic position sound alien. When I suggest that we should get the government out of education, most people think I hate education. They can't seem to envision any alternatives to state schooling. This reaction is not a coincidence, for they grew up in a state school and were not exposed to any alternatives. But it's because I care so much about education that I actually did some research on alternative systems.

I will eventually point to a few alternative systems, because they do actually exist and work quite well. But, before covering the vast universe of solutions, I want to explore more problems. More lessons learned in government indoctrination centers.

The Second Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state knows better than you do what skills you will need in life. It has a lesson plan that stretches from birth to young adult. It and it alone is qualified to write on the tabula rasa.

Think back on your experiences with school teachers, and especially administrators. Did you ever meet one of these certified (insane?) education "professionals" who thought they knew better than you? Was it perhaps motivated by their own internment with the system? Next time you run into one of the self-congratulatory authortarians, catch them off-guard by directly questioning their position. Ask why those many years spent away from you (and your child) have any bearing on present circumstances. Ask why those elective education classes about topics different than the one under discussion are relevant.

But really, children are born learners! I mean, it doesn't take an extra-ordinary child to begin speaking by age 2, and pretty well by age 5. If one of these children missed kindergarten, would they not know their basic colors? Would they not know the names of some common animals and fruits? Seriously, the toddlers are soaking this stuff up from their household environment.

Linda Darling-Hammond

If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.

Government lesson plans take knowledge and arrange it so that it reaches the minds of youth one tiny morsel at a time. The content is scripted into discrete lessons and delivered through a very unnatural format, where all the kids sit in neat rows and aren't allowed to move.

This setting discourages questioning of any kind. I don't have to conjecture that this design is a deliberate attempt to mentally malnourish us at the precise time we need knowledge and experience the most. I've read quotes from the designers of this mental slammer in John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education (you can read it free online, educate yourself!).

Grace Llewellyn

All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.

William Glasser

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Carl Rogers

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

But what about the structure of the lessons themselves? Is it really true that all children need to learn the same things, in the same order, and at the same age? Will any system, that has such bureaucratic planning actually produce good results when fed strikingly unique minds, each looking at the world with fresh eyes?

George Evans

Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.

Again, I did not attend any classes offered by the School of Education at my university, but I can only surmise that teachers exiting any government school actually think that a life in the day of a 7 year old can be scripted and planned. Preposterous! Anyone who pays attention to children, knows that their eyes light up when you present them with new and wondrous material. They instinctually want to learn!

John Holt

All I am saying ... can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

And where, of all places, do you think we were taught that lesson? But it doesn't have to be that way! Today, we have the technology that enables rapid communication of education methods. Technology that can put parents together as they each teach their own children. Technology that reaches into the dilapidated buildings of the third world.

Sugata Mitra, in his TED talk, Build a School in the Cloud, tells about how he has grandmothers in the UK can encourage children in Africa to learn and study complex topics like DNA. And the method of teaching is profoundly simple. You don't even have to know the material yourself. Just show a bit of interest, ask a few questions, give them time to explore on their own, and then follow-up by asking for them to teach you!

For the good of our own future, if not for theirs, let's release the children from these government camps of concentration!

Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 1: The State Provides

Today, in most of the western world, the State commands control of childhood education. I think this arrangement is a monstrous catastrophe. I know so, because their indoctrinations didn't completely work on me. Oh, it had an effect. They slowed me down considerably and I'll never recover the lost time or energy. But, I'm happy to be able to tell you all today about this particular tentacle of state control.

This topic will probably consume the entire week's posts. I'll talk about the work of Sugata Mitra and James Tooley, who both show ways out of the mess that I explore today. I'll talk about John Taylor Gatto, who worked within the system and has become a long-standing out-spoken critic of the evils that only government bureaucracy would invent. I'll even talk about my own personal experience, or at least what is still left in my memory. But before we get to all these wonderful conclusions...

Let's begin our navigational journey through the intellectual wasteland of statist training that's mistakenly referred to as education. We'll start first with the position of the state itself.

The First Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state provides education. Without state systematization, learning would be in anarchy. People would have a wide diversity of experiences and the distribution of opportunity would be uneven. Therefore, we couldn't have common culture. Thank the state, it can provide for us a lesson plan!

Seriously, the teachers graduating from statist schools actually agree with this statement! They don't wonder about the roots of the training system. I see these indoctrinators suffering from such severe myopia that they can't imagine any alternatives. Despite the obvious historical fact that people learned from each other and shared knowledge before the state ever existed. Really, all the state does, all it can do, is stamp its approval on certain lessons. Little wonder that the first lesson is to respect the state itself.

Think of the DMV and the quality of service that you get there. Do you want your children to be educated by people with such low levels of commitment? If the government is really, actually, beneficial in providing this service, then why are children forced to recite the pledge of allegiance? What's the deal with teaching everyone the same material? If my child skips kindergarten will they really miss out and never learn names of the primary colors? Let's find some independent thinkers to see what they have said about government schooling. I've specifically mined for quotes that relate to the First Lesson of State Indoctrination.

Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

Maya Angelou

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

Mark Twain

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Carl Rogers

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.”

Winston Churchill

"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."

Grace Llewellyn

“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.”

And for the seriously condemning quotes, we turn our attention toward the Russians.

Franz Kafka

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.”

Ivan Illich

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

But what happens when you question this lesson? Being the staunch (and self-educated) anarchist that I am (wait, would any anarchists be proud to advertise themselves as state-educated?) ... I'm losing my point here.

Oh yeah. The other year I accepted a fellowship in pedagogy at my university, and took a class about teaching. So, though I may not be an education major myself, I have spent 20 years in state school and ended that sentence with a course on teaching. During one of the class discussions, I found that every single person there took issue with the term "for-profit education". They automatically assumed that the teacher was somehow robbing the student. Yet, simultaneously, they recognize the value of private tutors!

These fellow classmates, who aim to be university-level educators themselves, implicitly thought that "for-profit" was intrinsically bad. That education is so very special it must be provided through government. In spite of the fact that these people were also very interested in their own subjects and majors and each of them held intrinsic motivation for the pursuit of knowledge, they still rejected the "for-profit" label. I'm left to wonder, why learn? Is it not to better oneself? to acquire marketable skills? to use the knowledge to help others? in a word: to profit?

I'll let a brilliant billionaire, who funds a fellowship that rewards high school students for skipping college, so that they can learn actually useful skills by practicing entrepreneurship, answer the question in his own market-based way:

Peter Thiel

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus."