Social Cohesion - The Dark Side

A page from the book of John Taylor Gatto - or at least the sort of ideas he represents. I can't handle much more than a page, since the guy is pretty wild, but I do find it useful to keep an eye on what he writes and says.

In my previous blog entry, I put in writing some thoughts about mild forms of indoctrination that instill a sense of a common cultural background and identity. The main message there was that for such mild indoctrination, kindergarten is enough, and TV is more than enough. Much more than enough actually, but that's a different issue.

One can see that some forms of stricter indoctrination do require years of work, conducted by professionals. For example, to create the type of religious zeal that enables a person to become a walking bomb. For such strict indoctrination, it is very useful to remove people from their traditional environment - families and neighbors - and effectively replace one social context for another. What takes the time and professional effort is not learning a culture - we do that effortlessly at home and at kindergarten. What takes all that effort is unlearning a culture and a nature.

This can actually be a useful sign: If in order to create social cohesion, an establishment need to remove kids from their families, and let professionals work on them for years, it means that the establishment is working very hard at erasing an existing culture, tradition or nature. This is grounds for suspicion.

We can get a sense of what needs to be erased and what needs to be built by looking at some basic differences between people going into the education system, and people coming out of it. Let's go for a few rhetorical questions about the differences between those going into and out of school:

• Members of which group tend to assume learning something new is fun?
  
  
• Which ones are more likely to ask questions about something they don't understand?
  
  
• Which group tends to be more creative in solving problems?
  
  
• Which is more likely to try something they are not sure they can do, and which tends to be so self-conscious about failure, that they avoid going where they haven't gone before?
  
  
• Which group spends more time posturing, and which spends more time doing what they like, regardless of what others may say?

There are more questions, even more sickening, but the picture is quite clear: It takes years to make a peg forget it is square, and start being used to the idea of a round hole.

To remove doubt or and preempt silly attacks: I am not speaking against learning, teaching or even schooling. The problems I describe seem to appear with centrally-controlled industrialized schooling. By nature such a schooling system is not able - nor very interested - to accommodate individual or local needs.

It may be argued that this system creates a more stable and predictable society, with a healthy consumer market. "Docile" may be the word. This may be true, but I can't accept docility as a goal for my own children. I want them to have a life more meaningful for them. And to keep my integrity, I wish your kids the same.