Some Thoughts on Education

This is a brief summary of my ideas on the future of the public school system of the U.S.A.

The public school system is in trouble. The system originally had two basic functions.
The first was the indoctrination of all children to the secular culture which began to replace the older ethnic one upon the founding of the republic.
This is the primary reason compulsory education was introduced.
The second function was the preparation of a large pool of qualified candidates to fill an ever increasing number of professional and managerial positions in between the laboring class and the owning class.

Neither of these functions is necessary today.

Indoctrination

Television is now the chief system of indoctrination in this country.
It is superior to other common forms of indoctrination - such as literacy - for the following reasons: It requires no formal preparation of the populace. It works on all ages, sexes, and ethnic groups alike.
It indoctrinates and maintains thought control since exposure to it is perpetual, rather than limited to one period of life - as schooling is. It makes more successful use of cognitive dissonance than any other form of indoctrination.

Cognitive dissonance is the simultaneous transmission of contradictory information along separate, but simultaneous communications channels in order to deceive.
For example, televising pictures of pitched battles and the bombardment of whole cities while an announcer's voice insists that war has not yet broken out - as was actually done repeatedly during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1,982.
This technique tends to create 'double think'.

The verbal and non-verbal components of the incident have incompatible meanings, so when the short term memory is compressed and converted to long term memory, the 2 components are stored separately .
Each of these components will require a different stimulus in order to be recalled.
So, if a viewer is asked about the war in Lebanon, he or she may have difficulty recalling either component of the story.
The more divergent the meanings which each sense and cognitive sub-structure assigns to an incident, the more fragmented the memories of that incident.
The more fragmented those memories, the harder they are to recall.

The Professional Class

There is decreasing need for a large pool of highly trained Americans to fill professional and managerial positions.
The formerly Bolshevised and the formerly colonized countries have been so de-stabilized that many of the educated persons in said countries can barely make a living.
These become immigrants and they now provide an almost inexhaustible supply of talent to fill these positions.
Furthermore, political events during the 1,960s demonstrated that if the pool of well educated Americans becomes too large - especially in proportion to the number of professional and managerial positions - it becomes a de-stabilizing force, causing political activity to break out of the arena to which it has been confined in this country.

When I wrote the first draft of this essay, I speculated that the current assumption that academic achievement in this country has declined from some past golden age was entirely unfounded.
A couple of recent magazine articles entirely confirm me in this belief.
It turns out that in 1,910 10% of student graduated from high school.
That percentage rose steadily until 1,973.
So there was never a 'golden age' of public schooling where most or even a large portion of the students were prepared for college.

It also turns out that the much decried drop in standardized test scores is due to more students staying in high school and taking the tests than before.

The quality of public high school education has almost certainly declined.
However, this does not mean that the ordinary person knew any more about geography, spelling, grammar, algebra, or history in 1,940 than he or she does now.
The ordinary person now goes through 12 years of schooling to become a loyal ignoramus instead of the 8 or less years of his or her grandparent's time.

So the current educational 'crisis' isn't about the majority of the students, past or present; it is about the minority of Americans who used to form the pool from which professionals and managers were drawn.
At the same time that there is more competition for these jobs due to the afore mentioned tide of immigration, well paying jobs which are not of this type are disappearing; so a larger portion of the population wants to get formal training.
The inability of high school graduates to get well paying jobs or guaranteed entrance to universities anymore is the source of the educational 'crisis' for which the public schools are unjustly being blamed.

Failing support

As the role of the public school system in the functions described above has diminished, so has its importance to the ruling élite. However, the system still remains vitally important to the common folk.
The system is still the main way for ordinary persons to begin their ascent of the caste ladder.

Public school also provides a subsidized day care service.
There, children sometimes learn to sit still for long periods, master skills for which they can see no apparent use, and obey their elders.
School also provides a regulated environment where children set up their own, miniature society.

The extended family and traditional community have collapsed and the nuclear family seems about to follow.
Therefore the above mentioned services are now vital to those households - the majority now - where there are no adults at home during the day.

Unfortunately for the common folk, the school system is beginning to fail in these functions as well.
Many neighborhoods are so dangerous that simply getting to the school grounds is an unpleasant adventure.
As the neighborhoods and even the children's parents have deteriorated, so has safety in the schools themselves.
It is at school that most children are first exposed to drugs, sex, and disease.
The recent trend of returning to one's religious roots - typified, but by no means limited to, the current Christian revival - has generated a large number of parents who do not want their children indoctrinated to the current culture.

The End in Sight

These trends are leading to a time when the common view of the public schools will be as dangerous places.
Places where government operatives brainwash children with values alien to those of the parents and the community.
A place where children are exposed to sex, disease, injury, and abuse (this, of course, has always been true,).
A place, in other words, where no self-respecting, decent (i.e. middle class) family would send its children.

Such popular perceptions will be used by the ruling élite to justify reducing the funding of the public schools.
When it has become the common perception that no one of political or social importance uses the public schools, financial support for them will collapse.
Those schools which survive will become the targets of various types of experiments - some of a secret and criminal nature.

The future of public education is bleak. It will receive more bad press coverage - regardless of the facts of the matter.
The customary idea that every child deserves an education at public expense will be publicly attacked.
Parents will, one way or another, have to privately foot the bill for most of their children's education.
Public schools will become increasingly diverse and unreliable in such matters as dress codes, hours and days of operation, vacation time, curriculum, teacher qualifications, and safety.
Eventually, public schooling will be abandoned.

Some Recent Thoughts

I wrote the first version of this on 1,996 November 22nd.
The reactions have been varied, but generally hostile.

A good friend insisted that many would think me paranoid for calling what public schools do, mind control, and for suggesting that criminal experiments would be conducted upon school children under any circumstances.
The visual format of the essay has been criticized as weird and difficult to read.
Perhaps some of my critics believe that, because of the date, I was suggesting yet another conspiracy theory!

In response to the business about experiments, I must say that I wrote this before the scandal of the radiation experiments broke.
I think the fact that the Federal Government would expose thousands of unsuspecting service men, patients, and, yes, retarded children, to doses of radiation just in order to see what would happen is proof enough of the reasonableness of my prediction.
To top it off, the justification for using sick and mentally defective children seems to have been that they had no future anyway.
One may listen to any of numerous A.M. radio talk shows in the N.Y.C. area in order to hear the same attitude being applied to colored, urban, school children today.

There have been several scandals similar to the radiation experiments over the last couple of decades: the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on unsuspecting Black men from the 1,930s til the 1,970s, the secret dosing of many unsuspecting persons with L.S.D. by the C.I.A. in the 1,960s, the testing of nerve gas on un-informed soldiers, germ warfare tests on the whole population of N.Y.C. in the 50s, etc.
As most of these scandals did not come to light as a result of a general mea culpa by the government, one is justified in concluding that numerous others may have been conducted and/or still be going on without our knowledge.
I will not even consider what may be happening behind the closed doors of university labs and corporate R. & D. departments.

As to the propriety of my referring to any of the gentle measures which the selfless leadership of this happy republic uses to lead it's people from the paths of error into the shining path of righteousness, as mind control or indoctrination, I can only direct those who object to my terminology to Noam Chomsky's book, "Manufacturing Consent".
If Mr. Chomsky's exhaustive research and example do not satisfy the critic, I then suggest he take up television watching and leave such degenerate scribblings as this essay to such scum as deserve them.

For those who object to tearing down without building up, or object generally to any form of writing which does not end on an up beat note, I outline below simple policies which - if it were possible to adopt them - would vastly improve public school education in even the worst districts.
The first thing to do in any intractable situation is to come to agreement on what is to be accomplished.
It used to be a common place notion that schools were to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic as their first order of business.
As tiresome as it may seem, this is not out of order.
There is no way to restore confidence in a popular system such as the schools without teaching those things upon which there is a broad consensus of agreement.
So my first recommendation is to confine public schools to teaching basic things.

Another simple policy which would is to pay the students for passing their courses.
The one thing which every American child becomes aware of early on is the pride of place given to money in this country.
Paying students would be signal that this country believes that academic achievement is important.
Those mid-teen thugs who annoy and frighten the rest of us would be breaking down the doors of the schools and libraries to study if they thought money was involved.
For those who think that money would corrupt the academic ideal, I suggest they spend more time on this planet rather than the one they are always talking about, but which the rest of us have never even seen.

Instituting a succeed or fail system of grading, along with easy retaking of tests - as is done in European universities, would also improve matters.
It makes no sense to have better or worse examination results in the process of qualifying students in their subjects by having various grades of success - much less to call attention to them. A driver has to know all the rules of the road, not 65% or 85%, but 100%.
Until he or she does, he or she is not qualified to drive.
Similarly with any other practical field of study.

A student should be able to take instruction until that student passes the tests and assignments or gives up.
No other measure of competence is necessary or helpful.
On the contrary, the competition for grades which discourages so many students who are not, by nature, competitive in this way is extremely destructive.

There are any number of other things which might be done to make public education more value neutral and efficient.
Given the imperatives of our social system, there is no reason to believe they will be.
Indeed, the opposite is much more likely.

January/2,001

"Frog on a Cactus" by Joan Hardin (copyright)

Home