I love your posts, Orwellian_ghost. And "The Corporation" was worth seeing.
Consider also looking hard at the interplay between corporatism and schooling -- not just the incursions of commercialism, but the historical roots and the intentional similarities in structure.
TWELVE years out of each person's life. While schools do teach the mechanics of reading for a couple of years,
the main lesson that is taught is obedience to the system. It is a 12 year sentence in a factory or prison, and good inmates are rewarded with "A"s. Good inmates do what they are told WHEN they are told to do it. Want to spend the day studying geometry because you are captured and excited by it? Too bad, the bell has rung. Want to spend a couple of hours reading a book by Chomsky you checked out from the high school library? I doubt that you'll find him there, and whatever you're reading, you can't spend the morning doing it because the bell is ringing. How about a project to learn to build your own solar power generator? Maybe a good science teacher could help you through that on the installment plan -- 30 minutes a week for six or weeks..will you lose interest at that speed? Like conditioning a lab rat, the protocol of schools is to interrupt, interrupt, interrupt. Reminds me of my workplace. You know, a person who has free time to think..is dangerous.
Schools are judged today as factories are, with students as "products". The pretense that schools are creating citizens is gone. No useful skills are taught except those skills that are useful in a corporate office. Kids are equipped with laptops in the "better schools" on their way to their destinies as accountants and managers; they are given lots of busy work to get them used to having their entire day sucked up
under someone else's direction, and their evening homework too.
Corporatism does not want students to be politically awakened.
H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
John Taylor Gatto describes what we have as
an educational 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 in order to render the populace "manageable."
Such a
docile and incomplete citizenry prefers being spoonfed television entertainment to the intellectual satisfaction that comes from reading books and shaping your own world views. This
docile and incomplete citizenry is interested in what it is told to be interested in, and votes for who it is told to vote for.
As an activist, I bet you sometimes find it frustrating how hard it is to wake people up. The People are waiting for instructions from the system.
