Weapon of mass instruction

Another school year has come to an end. Thousands of students have graduated, hoping for a great start in life, while some will continue their studies at universities and other higher education programs. But what are those kids really learning in the modern school systems of Canada and the United States?

They have been taught what was planned by the masters of society and turned into a curriculum that every teacher must follow, to create a new generation of perfectly programmed, obedient citizens. It does not matter whether something has been considered good or bad for centuries. The narrative can be flipped, and the current agenda becomes the undeniable truth without any questioning. Just keep the herd together; black sheep are not welcome. Even if some teachers do not agree with it, they still push the agenda on kids just to keep their paychecks coming.

The problems with our educational system are thoroughly described in Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, who taught in public schools for nearly thirty years.

The book is a critical examination of traditional education. Its central claim is that students’ imagination and critical-thinking abilities are weakened through memorization drills and other standardized educational practices.

The author suggests that the hidden curriculum deliberately cuts students off from practical life so that they become disconnected from their creativity and self-confidence. He argues that the ultimate objective of this hidden curriculum is to keep children childish for as long as possible, causing them to retain childlike characteristics even into adulthood. According to the author, even the concept of puberty is a social construct created to support this objective.

One of the two underlying reasons for this kind of educational policy, according to the author, is to create easy-to-control masses who have lost their sense of independence and responsibility and have instead developed traits such as greed, jealousy, deceitfulness, and dependence.

The second reason for keeping adults childlike is that the best consumers—those who are always willing to buy more than they need—are children and addicts. In other words, people remain ideal consumers if they retain childlike behavior. According to the author, another objective of the education system is to transform young students into lifelong consumers.

Providing a historical account of the reformation of American education system, the author draws a direct link between industrial production, its needs and education’s role on granting consumerism by way of self-estrangement. Gigantic commercial bodies which shifted to mass production at some point of history are naturally in need of huge masses of consumers.

From the perspective of the author, Prussian education system, which proved to be successful in the creation of a population of harmless voters and servile labor force, who are also myrmidon consumers, was taken as a model for American education. Compulsory education with a Prussian approach in its basis was also necessary to establish a centralistic education organization which was neatly planned to deactivate the democratic and independent understanding of conventional American education system that relied on regional and decentralized educational policies in which families took active part.

In addition to a centralized and cumbersome educational organization, the construction of a society consisted of self-alienated members whose daily lives cycle around a routine of working long hours and spending all their gains without questioning was taken for granted via the simplification of school curriculum and a deliberately structured corruption at schools. In brief, the capitalist fear of over-production required a stratified society whose majority was consisted of people who lost their abilities of rational thinking, questioning and criticizing, and hence, the duty of being the social engineer for the required transformation was given to education system. To keep students’ connections with practical life active, the author puts forward the method of open-source learning. He prefers to explain his theory of open-source learning by means of providing evidence and examples in view of the complex nature of the term itself.

He makes use of life stories of successful people whose education backgrounds are common: These people are either school dropouts, unsuccessful students, or people with no education history. Nevertheless, they share another common point that is a life story ending up with a great success. According to the author, all these people were brave entrepreneurs and they started to gain experience about a certain profession at an early age.

The implication of the author here is that school education is not the only key for being successful in life; to the quite contrary, the people who start learning from real life experiences at a relatively early age have the advantage of learning practical information that is far more necessary in life.

Keeping in mind that school curriculum is made up of trivial subjects that are only useful for standardized examinations and acquiring diplomas or certificates, the author claims that specialization in a certain profession and acquisition of a spirit of entrepreneurship would help people to be more successful in life.

The question asked here is whether it is possible to fix education system by way of a series of reforms or not. The author’s answer to this question is not affirmative as he learned well from his own experiences. He claims that opposing arguments against current school system are swiftly silenced, and even in some cases, these arguments are silenced by force. As a result, it is not possible to open education system to argument and to find rational solutions to the problems it creates. As democratic ways of looking for logical and practical solutions for the education system are clogged, the author provokes students to act together and start an action of civil disobedience, which he named as Bartelby project.

The perfect example was the COVID-19 “plandemic,” when highly educated people in various fields followed the official narrative without questioning it, simply because the same highly educated authorities said so.

Many of them and others have already paid a cruel price for it, while the people involved gained billions.

And what is the solution? We need to thoroughly re-examine every aspect of our society, as over the past decades North America has, in our view, been influenced by external agendas and by corruption within both domestic and international structures.

A necessary step would be to place honest, competent, and ethically grounded people in positions of leadership so they can change the current direction in which society is heading.

OK, DB