First published, 22nd February 2018
It’s a common fact of human nature that what people decide is right depends almost entirely on whether they understand it. What is difficult, complex and detailed is, for the average person, wrong. Truth is simple; simplicity itself. However, the way in which people decide what is true and what to believe depends on cognitive processes that seek to short circuit reality rather than accurately and completely map it. The overall result of this phenomenon, so presently prevalent in individuals and societies, is a steady cultural decline that might only be arrested through the kindling of respect for what, at an initial glance, is unfathomable, foreign, awkward and challenging. All things in post industrial culture that could be thrown into some rekindling of curiosity, self-criticism and a willingness to spend time and energy on the difficult to initially comprehend (such as education and social, political and moral leadership) are disappearing not least because they have themselves embraced and now extol the apparent virtues of the simple. The rot, the downward spiral, is irreversible. That, for example, democracies are increasingly unable to give representative power to administrations and governments that are composed of rational and complex human beings, is symptomatic of intellectual decline, itself induced by capitalist consumerism, the misuse of technologies and the nature of industrialised education. Donald Trump is a sign, if not a symbol, of this decline; he is not so much a contributing cause. On the reverse side of the coin, in such a culture, the likes of Bernie Sanders, are viewed with almost hostile skepticism by the majority; a majority that grows more confident and, thereby, more tyrannous in its appetite for the easy and the banal. The voting public would sooner it were represented by an afternoon TV chat show host than a professor of economics and politics from Harvard.
There is one aspect of this ‘tyranny of the simple’ that is of particular interest, if only because all other aspects alluded to are most obviously affected by it (including, of course, the unthinking culture of the simple). For want of a better term, this can be referred to as the Education Industrial Complex. The meaning of this term need not be defined because an intelligent reader will have his or her intuitive understanding, or, if not, its significance may unfold in the course of what follows.
The first simplification to be identified and dismantled is that the terms ‘education’, ‘personal development’ and ‘school’ are, contrary to the tyranny of state thinking, more unconnected than otherwise. ‘State thinking’ is what the government industrial complex (that vehicle of corporate power) promulgates via media technologies and what becomes, thereby, the public conception and prevailing culture of belief. In the past, the technologies of religion (scripture, churches, art) were the predominant means for indoctrination and control of individuals by the church-state complex. Now, it is the secular ‘state’ qua the global networks of corporate commerce – that itself transcends state borders – that seeks to coerce and control the individual for its own means and ends. Whatever, the broad experience for the individual citizen in either case remains the same, namely: the sensation and actuality of the reduction of self-determination that is inversely proportional to the augmentation of external control: the increase of freedoms for an increasingly small minority at the expense of the loss of liberty by a growing majority.
Just as with the church, the modern secular state complex understands the importance of education. The narrow consequences of indoctrination required by the church to ensure an obedient and compliant flock for state manipulation in, for example, times of internal or external threat and conflict, have been widened in the post industrial age, only in so far as so-called ‘education’ has been extended to include a broader set of skills and knowledge to allow for the creation and control of a workforce that is, rather magically and conveniently, also the consumer population. In turning the population into both producers and consumers (erroneously simplified by economists as being two distinct and separate socioeconomic entities) the hierarchy of the state ensures that the control and ownership of the factors of production (excepting, perhaps, entrepreneurship) are extended for those already in positions of power that provide them with the means to prevail and grow further. The vehicles for this growth include: exploitation of the fiscal system, interest rate control, debt creation, bonus and salary fixing, labour law, and a plethora of other and more corrupt means such as the manipulation of pension funds, bribing of loyal election candidates, political lobbying, tax evasion, expense claim abuse, and so on.
Education, self-development, school and work have become bound together and, as such, comprise at least part of the Education Industrial Complex, which is, despite the terminology, a simplification. Simplification can often be achieved by the amalgamation of disparate parts. This creates a false conception because it results in a denial of the importance of discrete parts and the complexities of connections. The process of thinking, thinking itself, is little more than the cognition of connections. Knowledge of the fact that two things are connected can collapse into a conflation of parts and the loss of an understanding and appreciation of how two things might be separate and that what connected them was more important and valuable. Knowing how parts relate is essential in defining. The three terms identified as being part of the Education Industrial Complex in actual fact have quite separate identities. To appreciate what this means and to understand the importance of the significance of this assertion, it is helpful to consider how the state has created a conflation of the terms in the first instance.
The school (ages 5–18) is essentially a fairly recent technology. Its function is to prepare individuals for work on an industrial scale. During the course of the process, the school provides just those skills and parcels of knowledge as are required to produce workers who are, as has been claimed, both the producers and consumers for the élite of the social order that uses the mechanisms of state to control and coerce. It can be seen that the schools of the ‘education system’ are increasingly refined in and efficient at workforce creation. It will suffice to suggest that the education system is more inclined, and better able, to provide quantifications rather than qualifications. Throughout the process of honing an individual worker, the education system seeks to test, assess, examine and score on a desperately regular and frequent basis. The growing obsession for the system to quantify and measure future workers, as they pass through the rat pipe, is indicative of a state controlled by an élite of executives and bureaucrats increasingly paranoid that they may not be getting the best return on their investment in human resources that they could. ‘Education’, as it appears in the term ‘education system’ has little if anything to do with personal development, enlightenment, edification or nurture but rather more to do with drilling, preparation and indoctrination. The education system comprises an important part of the industrial process that is, itself, part of the industrial complex.
The workplace is an extension of the education system. The individual therefore is prepared not for life but work, i.e. an individual that will pay taxes and consume as well as produce (at least a part of what s/he will consume). In a developed knowledge economy, the worker will spend anything up to a third of his or her existence being prepared for work functions. They will spend a further third to a half of their lives performing actions that provide them with the means to produce goods and services for consumption and, thereby, contribute to the flow of money through the economy from which governments, banks and other private and financial institutions will remove at least a third of earnings and create, partly in order to ensure compliance and obedience during the working life, debt. Indeed, one of the primary functions of the higher tier of the education system is to create the first wave of long term financial liability. Whatever, it certainly is not the case that the education system seeks to prepare individuals for a fulfilling life or provide them with the means to better determine their own life paths.
That skills and opportunities for self-determination may accidentally emerge from out of the education process cannot be denied, and clever individuals may find ways of using the system to enhance the chances of developing what they need in order to achieve personal goals and aspirations. However, the state must consider this unintended ‘abuse’ of the system to be an inefficiency. The externalities of social benefits must remain within the control of social order, government and corporate power. Self-fulfilling and self-seeking ‘rogue’ individuals are to be regarded as undesirable leaks. Certainly, the state must control and contain individuals who, upon completion of studies, make a bolt for the dwindling open spaces. In this respect, laws and regulations for preventing off-grid lifestyles and for corralling self-seekers back into the fold of ‘exploitment’ can be passed as and when required. However, it remains to be seen how long the state can succeed in forcing certain recalcitrant and troublesome individuals out of their RVs and back into extortionate rentals, or in taking into state control children whose parents have chosen to homeschool, in view of the fact that, as those forced into poverty increase each year, there are more and more individuals unable to afford basic necessities to survive.
This is, perhaps, a bleak view of what education seems, from a certain perspective, to be. Though by no means wholly accurate or complete, there is at least a small kernel of truth or reality here that should provide cause for concern for thinking parents and their unfortunate children.
The essential reality for parents and students to grasp is that the education system is really just part of an industrial complex. As such, to survive being in it or involved with it requires a conscious awareness that the system is not there for the express benefit of the student. Fair enough, perhaps. But and further, education is a merit good not for the benefit of society as a whole but the socioeconomic élite and, as such, the system is essentially a global drone factory. (Having said that, it is equally important to note that the socioeconomic élite absent themselves from the state controlled/controlling system and, of course, there must exist and prevail an independent or private system which creates a fee-paying barrier to entry for the vast majority. The independent system is particularly important in the US and U.K. and functions to cocoon the socioeconomic 1-10% from the great unwashed).
Does this mean that ‘education’, in its broad sense, is increasingly becoming a sort of fraud, a lie? Possibly, in a way. There is an illusion going on and it is important for individuals to be aware of this and how it works. An intelligent young person needs, today, to be more acutely and, perhaps, cynically, aware of the social engineering going on here. Smart types and strong personalities will always survive to become authentic and self-fulfilling individuals who succeed in achieving goals they set for themselves and that they will not allow should be determined by others. The fact that the education process is becoming increasingly commercial and industrialised does not entail that the more thoughtful and intelligent will not manage somehow to determine their own lives, but they will do so in spite and not because of the education industry. The individual who aspires to be independent, authentic and content, once they have survived the winter anxieties of formal education, will need to find ways to circumvent the ‘quantification’ passport system that has been set up to control access to the world of exploitment. Creative and forceful souls will manage this through self-development, self-employment and/or playing the system to gain the required rubber stamps.
Children are now working longer hours than business executives, they are being subjected to more pressure and accountability on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis than the leaders of commerce and industry they hope to become one day. Possibly the happiest futures will be for those who manage, somehow, to ‘leak’ out of the system. These will be creative and wilfully independent types destined for self-employment and who have garnered skills and/or possess talents that are rare and desired by society. They will possess a degree of stoical resignation and patience that will give them the strength to muddle through their grinding sentence of stultifying classes, inane and endless tests (whose key purpose is to induce anxiety and remove critical and creative thinking) relatively unscathed.
Anxious and frustrated parents might console themselves by reflecting upon the fact that, as environments go, schools provide all the confusion, injustice and unpleasant tedium and distraction found in life thereafter pretty well and, as such, they provide a sound enough nursery in which the young individual might craft and test the skills needed to successfully set his or her course to self-fulfilment in a mad world.
Success is defined by the achievement of self-set goals, whatever they might be. The prerequisites for success are found in or determined by personality. Fortunately, in spite of what it is schools think they are doing, a person primarily succeeds (or not) by dint of innate and intrinsic qualities. We should always look critically and analytically at ourselves, at least as much as our environments and circumstances, when trying to decide what went wrong or where next to go. What we are, or become, is determined by who we are, less so the other way round. As such, it might take a certain degree of courage to appreciate that schools are, by and large, time-consuming irrelevancies.
Having said this, it is also important to value the impact of those environments beyond the school bounds. Home environments provide opportunities to create experiences that parents must utilise to undo all the damage done during the working week. The importance of the nature and quality of conversation, the books left lying around, music played, food, interior design, houses lived in, gardens, visits, clothes, walks, all opportunities to foster a sense of responsibility, and all other forms of discourses available in the cultural environment that remain under our control and that inform opinions, values, taste, judgement and, most significantly, systems of belief, cannot be overstated. Such opportunities to develop home environment enrichment are, sadly, also very much under attack from the education industry that increasingly steals time with the menace of homework and extends the tyranny of assessment anxiety and grade chasing. Parents and children, again, need to find strategies to minimise the damage and frustration caused by school overtime. Students and parents who over value the importance of grades and homework assignments will be consumed by them as required by the system; they are the instruments of coercion and control, after all.