Saturday Thoughts: The Benefit of Schooling

I need to learn arithmetic and calculations. But, do I need to learn it in a classroom over twelve years and including things such as calculus and quadratic equations that very few people need to understand and fewer actually use?

I need to learn to read and write, but do I need to learn the difference between a Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet? I need to know the history of our culture and the changes and context that it will provide for understanding current events, but do I need to know who the commanders were at the battle of Leningrad?

I remember being tested on all of these things and I know that I answered most of them correctly on the test. I do not remember the answers to these questions now, although I remember that I was asked them.

Accounting, however, was an optional class and I was never given any lessons on the laws and paperwork that I have encountered as a adult. I was never taught, despite five years of career planning classes, how to deal with my taxes or my health insurance or any things that I would actually need.

There is a distinct benefit to schooling, but that benefit is for those people who wield the whips. When we emerge from schooling, we lack basic knowledge of how to manage in the adult world, and because of the increased work load and the need to do extra-curricular activities to earn scholarships and be accepted into post-secondary education- parents have very little mentoring that they have allowed to add. And thus the domesticated adult emerges from the womb of high school blind and hairless. He lacks the teeth and claws that are used by modern society and the knowledge of how best to defend himself with them. He is unable to hunt for himself and so is relegated to a subservient role within the pack- begging from scraps from more the alpha and other successful hunters.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor 

is the mind of the oppressed."

 Steve Biko- Activist

For twelve years, the developing mind of the young domesticated human is engaged in challenging and intellectually stimulating tasks- such as organic chemistry, the politics of Shakespeare's Macbeth, trigonometry, the history of the Russian Revolution, and how to dissect an earthworm. These tasks are deliberately challenging and seem very important. In this way, the mind of the young domesticated human is distracted. 

Once they have grown out of their most active period of learning, the young can be discharged into the wild where they are easily captured and roped into the existing herds. They are domesticated humans now, and not wild humans. But when the wild submits to domestication- it also sacrifices its freedom.