Enslaved by the Bell
Classroom Education Is Mental Abuse
Classroom education wasn’t introduced to the United States until the early 19th century. Religious classroom education started in Germany around the 16th century. The aim was always to inculcate pliable minds with the dogmas of their time, in the service of their masters.
Long ago, there was no such thing as school education. Children would either seek out apprenticeships or start work early.
Yet, it’s so easy to point out everything that’s wrong with the education system, both modern and past. It’s the format itself that leads to psychological problems among every generation squeezed through the system.
As a teenager, I was subjected to the following regime: Get up early to start eight or nine blocks of 40 to 50 minutes of education, with a short break after the third block and a lunch break after the fifth. Each block meant to switch topics: Dutch, English, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, history, geography, and whatnot. The school bell signaled when the human cattle had to move to the next classroom to be taught another subject by the next teacher on the roster.
This isn’t learning. This is juggling topics for several years just to earn a diploma. And it’s a mental health problem. There is no goal orientation. There is no room for deep thought. There is no room for one’s own thinking at all, anyway. Most teachers are government officials, not educators. They’re in it for job security, for the position of authority they may yield over children, certainly not for the advancement of humanity.
For public schools, the state determines the curriculum. In religious schools, which have an exempt status in The Netherlands, a religious body determines the learning materials. In private schools, it’s whatever parents pay for. Nowhere do children have any say in the things they want to learn about except for a few alternative schools.
Whichever ideology a school subscribes to, they all put children of around the same age in age-stratified classrooms. Since most of these children can learn nothing much from one another (since they’re at the same developmental level), they become wholly dependent on the teacher’s authority. In fact, all schools teach obedience to authority.
School requires children to be silent most of the time and to listen to the teacher and then silently solve problems, usually by themselves. This is not how bridges are built. This is now how wars are won. This is not how sports teams win matches. This is not how society works.
The focus on obedience, then, is an attempt at domesticating children. If successful, and it mostly is, the effects are life-long. Very few individuals manage to stay immune to the conditioning, and I count myself among these ‘lucky’ ones, though it makes life a burden being surrounded by submissive cattle.
School, first and foremost, teaches children they should not rely on their own thinking. One’s thoughts about the world have to be discarded in favor of a scientific worldview, a materialist worldview, a religious worldview, or any other worldview society deems having enough authority to be taught to children.
Sometimes worldviews change and the people once educated in them will discover they have become obsolete overnight.
True education shouldn’t involve classrooms full of bored, numbed, desensitized children told their thoughts don’t matter and only the Holy Teacher may look up the answers in the official guidebook. Societies as a whole have become too rigid.
Instead of having a mass culture geared toward stratifying millions of people, we should go back to the sort of family life that allowed each family to hold their own interpretation of the surrounding world.
We should aim for intellectual diversity, not visual diversity.