Everything You Know About School Is Wrong
It’s funny how we’re taught history* in school but not the history of how schools were started. When I share with people the reason schools were invented, their eyes glaze over as if what I’m saying is made up. Take what resonates.
I want to share how schools - the place children are sent to for 12 years - came about, and why it still exists even though it doesn’t seem to be working (much like diets). And by school I mean the system, not the many amazing humans in it.
Please don't take my word for it, take what resonates leave what doesn't. Do you own research, observe your child's (and other children's) experiences, and reflect on your own time in school.
School was unnecessary for centuries; “the young were too valuable a part of economic and social reality. Indispensable, in fact.” (Weapons of Mass Instruction). Most people were entrepreneurs - butchers, bakers, tailors, and had small businesses - then came along the industrial age demanding increased employees, so the government adopted the Prussian system.
Prussia was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea, which was among the first countries in the world (around 1748) to introduce tax-funded and compulsory primary education.
John Taylor Gatto, teacher and author, was shocked that the Prussian system was adopted, which he explains is a system “deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens.”
Meet German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the visionary behind the Prussian education system.
In the 1800’s forced schooling wasn’t popular, in fact, it was heavily resisted (sometimes with guns) and only eventually got uptake through bribes, subsidies and harassment.
Victoria passed The Education Act 1872, which required all children aged 8-15 to attend school unless they had a reasonable excuse. The Act introduced standardised education, deciding which subjects would be taught in Victorian schools.
In 1903, John D. Rockefeller created the General Education Board with a document that read:
“In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hands.”
Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced a comprehensive national program to allow the control of human behaviour. School figured centrally in its design.
The 1920s saw the boom of compulsory schooling.
The General Education Board, together with a group of industrialists and financiers, such as Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, “with their private charitable foundations, heavily subsidised university chairs, researchers, and school administrators, actually spent more money on forced schooling’s early years than did the government.” (Weapons of Mass Instruction).
Between 1967 and 1974, teacher training was revamped so that it went through a certified board (funded by Rockefeller) rather than having people with specific skills. This was a Prussian method of teachers being trained through their own system.
This board dictated what subjects were taught in schools. (It’s interesting how they didn’t include subjects on financial independence/entrepreneurship, connection with nature, self-healing, and the power of your spirit).
Schools are intended to produce predictable and controlled humans. Two of the main objectives for conditioning humans through the school system is to produce employees and consumers, keeping you constantly in need of a paycheck and endlessly buying stuff (you don't need) - I'll go into this more in another blog.
For now watch this video I made about it
“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
“The educational world has to go through a real revolution. People should not be forced, children should not be forced into repetitive patterns.
What is your education?
Have you ever looked into it?
Have you ever pondered over it?
It is simply a training in memory. You don't become intelligent through it, you become more and more unintelligent. You become stupid!
Each child enters the school very intelligent but it is very rare that a person comes out of university and is still intelligent - it is very rare.The university almost always succeeds. Yes, you come with degrees, but you have purchased those degrees at a great cost; you have lost your intelligence, you have lost your joy, you have lost life - because you have lost the functioning of the right-side-hemisphere."
~ OSHO
What if, together, we created a new way for children to experience learning and naturally evolve? Where children and families are free to follow their curiosity and engage in their creativity with other passionate humans within a safe community.
Here are some ideas on how that could look...
The current school system was constructed without any public participation or even much public knowledge. Let’s be part of creating something new, something we’re excited about and that children will love.
With a whole lotta love
* I use the word ‘history’ loosely as the history taught in schools are bits assembled by the Education Board and then adjusted to indoctrinate.
PS - want to read more about the true intention of schooling? This book is a great, especially "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher.'
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