The education machine has become a risk to freedom. We must stop feeding it our young.
College attendance is a Faustian Bargain. Students acquire credentials in exchange for submission to the influence of the institution. Some of this influence is positive - exposure to valuable cultural and technical thought - while some is insidious. For a century, this bargain has been worsening.
The insidious aspect is exposure to deep conditioning: moral, psychological, ideological. Our ruling technocracy requires citizens that are amenable to the logic and mechanisms of the managerial state. Discordance would arise if the young valued a mode of life that the state is unable to provide, or sources of meaning that no longer exist, or an identity that is incompatible with population management.
The core lesson that the education system imparts - by its very existence - is the centrality of bureaucracies to personal development. In modern society, one learns not by being richly embedded into a challenging reality, but by outsourcing one’s development to an institution. The reality that most learning can and should happen independently, and requires no teaching, is suppressed.
It is worth a detailed analysis of the pressures of the current political system, how the education machine meets these pressures, why our present moment represents an inflection point, and what is to be done to regain freedom.
provides a useful dissection of the managerial state in his comprehensive essay The China Convergence. The power structure that has emerged in the West is technocratic, materialist, expansionist, and self-perpetuating. Its systems-based approach to societal management requires predictability and submission. Operating at the inhuman distance that it does from everyday life, it pursues abstract goals (rising GDP) through the use of crude mechanisms (like mass immigration). It can tolerate no structures that might compromise its comprehensive management, including mobilized populations (‘populism’) and ultimately democracy itself.This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological… Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.
— N.S. Lyons, The China Convergence
How, then, does the system protect itself against the threat of active resistance by a citizenry who are gradually losing their ability to self-determine? Better still, how are these citizens to be transformed into active supporters of the regime?
Enter the educational machine.
State-supported education, at all levels, functions to sever the young from organic ties to competing loyalties and to replace these loyalties with deference to the managerial system. The isolation of the student from their family and traditions is followed by a process of homogenization coupled with a reward structure that presents those whom invest sufficiently in the machine (through years of higher education) with certifications that mark them as suitable for elite employment.
This system has both evolved through the organic interplay between educational institutions and entrenched elites (decades of expanding funding and mutual prestige signaling), but also as a result of intentional activism by progressives.
Lyons gives the example of prominent education reformer John Dewey, who was influential under the Wilson presidency.
Dewey believed public education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform” precisely because it was, he wrote, “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Social reconstruction meant reengineering society. Frank Lester Ward, Dewey’s teacher and mentor (and the first president of the American Sociological Association) was even less bashful: the purpose of formal education, he said, was now to be “a systemic process for the manufacture of correct opinions” in the public mind. (It should, he added, therefore be brought under the exclusive control of government, since “the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.”)
It is necessary for us to examine the method of this harmful reconstruction. This is because we cannot abandon education wholesale; done correctly, it is too valuable, too necessary. If we can isolate the suppressive mechanisms used by the regime, however, perhaps we can pursue a more nuanced strategy.
The work of Ivan Illich, the radical Austrian philosopher and priest (which
has done much good in drawing attention to) is useful here. Illich’s 1971 polemic against mass schooling, Deschooling Society, attacks the entire modern educational paradigm. His ideas were influential in the homeschooling movement; less influential were his ideas about college - but I believe that their time has come.The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education.
— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
The modern school system serves to capture and monopolize learning, which is advertises as ‘education’. It thus confuses substance with process, suggesting that in order to learn, the individual must submit to and sublimate themselves within an institution that ‘specializes’ in learning. Learning outside an institution is suspect, and lacking official certification, its value is reduced.
Our young are thus schooled to perceive value, development, and bureaucratic participation as indistinguishable. This lays the foundation for all activities to default to those of client relationships with specialized institutions: health becomes medical care, safety becomes policing, awareness becomes media consumption.
The genius of this sleight of hand is that it justifies limitless bureaucratic expansion: when the population’s health degrades we need more interventions, when misinformation proliferates we need more fact checkers, when competency declines we need more education.
Naturally, then, those who wish to be free must reverse this process. The opposite of managerialism is self-governance; the opposite of education is self-teaching. If we continue supporting the pantomime of ‘manufactured maturity’ then we will never develop a population of sufficient conviction and independence to resist managerial encroachment.
The moment has come for us to seize the initiative.
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