Invaders and conquerors often implement schooling for the children of the conquered population. Not only do invaders implement educational systems, today nonprofits, and in the past the equivalent, perhaps churches or other organizations, go to different cultures and establish schools. This is meant to educate the locals, but what is meant by education in this context? It merely means forcing children to learn, or be taught and not learn, what the teachers and educational system considers important at that particular time. As history advances it is easy to look back at what was being taught and consider it to be trivial, ridiculous, or immoral and destructive.
For example, many people would consider what was done to the Native Americans (Native American Boarding Schools) immoral or at the very least pointless, however, at the time it was considered educating and improving the Native Americans by teaching them skills and knowledge they need. What makes us think that the schools we are building across the world through initiatives like the United Nations - Every Child in School and A World At School (both seem to be the spawn of Gordon Brown by the way) is any better? The United Nations site linked states "Priority #1: Put Every Child in School". As I have shown in my other articles in this series, schooling often leads to stress, depression, suicide, and prison. What makes us think that the initiatives to teach the "uneducated" children of other cultures will have any better effect than what happened when they tried to do the same to the Native Americans? If you look at the goals of these non profits, they do not say that they want children in some indigenous or third world cultures to not attend school and only children in post industrial societies to attend western modern schools. They say they want every single child to attend western modern schools, irrespective of their culture and traditions. They do not say that children in indigenous, hunter gather, or third world societies can learn how their culture already survives, what skills they need to survive in that particular culture and existing mode of survival. They say they want every single child to go to western schools and get a western education. Obviously they don't specify the schooling with the word western, but it obvious and there is no question that these non profits want to implement the equivalent of british or american public schooling in every culture and have every single child attend these schools.
What would be the result of having every child in school, as is stated as the exact goal of these certain evil organizations? The result would be cultural genocide, the destruction of diversity in culture, the decrease in population with lower birth rates as people focus more on work and money, an increase in depression and suicide across the world, and the waste of youth across the world. The loss of knowledge not considered important in western schooling, such as local edible and medicinal plants, or indigenous crafts and ways of survival. The conformity in thought that the monetary modern western way of survival of jobs and work is the only way to survive, and the subsequent conformity in means of survival across all cultures.
No one would have a natural personality because they would be tamed and disciplined at a young age, like wild horses broken and tamed, they will never be the same. Individualism and creativity would be punished and conformity and servitude would be encouraged. They would be taught they are not equal to other people, for arbitrary and baseless reasons. The teacher is above them and can tell them what to do, but there is no basis for his authority and condescension, and rather than learning empowerment and confidence, the child learns timidness and servitude.
School has been used as a tool of cultural genocide, indoctrination, assimilation for thousands of years.
School as a Tool of Indoctrination
In ancient Sparta, children were taken from their families at the age of 6 or 7 and taught loyalty to the state and conformity.
From Agoge Wikipedia - Ancient Spartan Schools:
Beginning at the age of 12 boys would be given only one item of clothing per year .... They also created beds out of reeds pulled by hand, with no knife, from the Eurotas River. Boys were intentionally underfed to encourage them to steal food for themselves; however, they were severely punished if caught. This was also meant to produce well-built soldiers rather than fat ones. This let the boys become accustomed to hunger, and this prevented hunger from being a problem during battle.
To modern people today this seems harsh and unnecessary. Why wouldn't today's system of locking children in school for 8 hours a day for 16 years teaching them useless things they will never use and soon forget not seem harsh and unnecessary to societies in the future? Why would our society of wage slavery be looked upon with kinder light than a military society?
In Nazi Germany, a Jewish former student writes:
Now all teachers had to join the Nazi Party, in which they were brainwashed to follow the party’s antisemitic policy. They were also forced to refute their former political beliefs. If they did not, they were “retired” from their jobs. Henceforth, many teachers would come in dressed in Nazi uniform. My class teacher called me over and tried to explain this new situation, as it affected his relationship with me. “I will have to teach Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, but be assured I will not let the class express the Judenhass [hatred of Jews] against you.”
A new course of study was introduced in school in the early 1930s called Rassenkunde (race knowledge). The teacher wanted to spare me from being in class when he would teach this subject. Therefore, he taught it on Saturdays when I did not attend school.
One day, another teacher explained in class, “I want to show you how a Jew looks.”
.....
In another subject called Philosophical Propadeutic (history of philosophy), the teacher used the book The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg, an Estonian non-Jew with a Jewish name. Man, according to his idea, was a combination of blood and flesh without a spirit. His body was guided by “intuition” which man had the power to evoke. Hitler, he claimed, possessed this intuition, which he was able to implant in all his followers.
There was another change for students attending school during Hitler’s time. At the entrance to the building, students had to lift their arms and say, “Heil Hitler!” I was exempt from doing so.
From Education - Nazi Genrmany:
Even before coming to power, Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925–27; “My Struggle”) had hinted at his plans for broad educational exploitation. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda exercised control over virtually every form of expression—radio, theatre, cinema, the fine arts, the press, churches, and schools. The control of the schools began in March 1933 with the issuing of the first educational decree, which held that “German culture must be treated thoroughly.”
The Nazi government attempted to control the minds of the young and thus, among other means, intruded Nazi beliefs into the school curriculum. A major part of biology became “race science,” and health education and physical training did not escape the racial stress. Geography became geopolitics, the study of the fatherland being fundamental.
Whether it is modern society encouraging wage slavery, Spartan society encouraging military attainment, or Nazi Germany encouraging racism, schooling is used to mold the children into what is considered correct and proper at that time and for that society. For modern western society, office work and intellectual skills in specific arbitrary subjects are what is considered important, so schooling would replace and destroy the skill sets and knowledge of other societies, a form of indoctrination. Modern schooling is not indoctrinating children to be warriors or racists, but it is encouraging and indoctrinating the children to believe in and pursue certain monetary systems, societal organization, and means of survival. There is a presumed purpose of schooling in terms of financial and educational attainment, however the result of schooling in many cases is introducing the children into criminality and the perpetuation of poverty, especially when the children do not do well conforming to the demands of school. In any case, the indoctrination is the same, whether the children are successful at it's specified goals and measures of success or not. Children learn to not see other options for success, failure, or means of survival. They learn success at the doctrine should lead to a certain way of life and failure should lead to another.
The indoctrination idea is expressed from a coupled different people in this article about Marxism and eduction:
“To state this in more scientific language, I will say that the reproduction of the labor force demands not only reproduction in teaching workers skills, but also in simultaneously reproducing submission to the dominant ideology” (Fernandez, Enguita).
(Lenin stated)“The more cultured the bourgeois state, the more subtly it lied when declaring that schools could stand above politics and serve society as a whole. In fact the schools were turned into nothing but an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. They were thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois caste spirit. Their purpose was to supply the capitalists with obedient lackeys and able workers...We say that our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy” He also says, “The bourgeoisie themselves, who advocated this principle, made their own bourgeois politics the cornerstone of the school system, and tried to reduce schooling to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, to reduce even universal education from top to bottom to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, of slaves and tools of capital. They never gave a thought to making the school a means of developing the human personality.”
This article also describes the link between school and wage slavery.
Murray Rothbard's book Education Free and Compulsory contains many quotes detailing the conformity and indoctrination imposed by school. For example he quotes Herbert Spencer as stating:
For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life — to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this — a government ought to mold children into good citizens…. It must first form for itself a definite conception of a pattern citizen; and, having done this, must elaborate such system of discipline as seems best calculated to produce citizens after that pattern. This system of discipline it is bound to enforce to the uttermost. For if it does otherwise, it allows men to become different from what in its judgment they should become, and therefore fails in that duty it is charged to fulfill.
and another Herbert, Herbert Read:
Mankind is naturally differentiated into many types, and to press all these types into the same mold must inevitably lead to distortions and repressions. Schools should be of many kinds, following different methods and catering for different dispositions.
The effect of progressive education is to destroy independent thought in the child, indeed to repress any thought whatsoever. Instead, the children learn to revere certain heroic symbols (Gentile), or to follow the domination of the "group" (as in Lafcadio Hearn's Japan). Thus, subjects are taught as little as possible, and the child has little chance to develop any systematic reasoning powers in the study of definite courses.
The idea that the school should not simply teach subjects, but should educate the "whole child" in all phases of life, is obviously an attempt to arrogate to the State all the functions of the home. It is an attempt to accomplish the molding of the child without actually seizing him as in the plans of Plato or Owen.
Unquestionably, the effect of all this is to foster dependence of the individual on the group and on the State.
From Schooling In Capitalist America by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis:
In our view, it is pointless to ask if the net effect of U.S. education is to promote equality or inequality, repression or liberation. These issues pale into insignificance before the major fact: The educational system is an integral element in the reproduction of the prevailing class structure of society. The educational system certainly has a life of its own, but the experience of work and the nature of the class structure are the bases upon which educational values are formed, social justice assessed, the realm of the possible delineated in people's consciousness, and the social relations of the educational encounter historically transformed.
In short, and to return to a persistent theme of this book, the educational system's task of integrating young people into adult work roles constrains the types of personal development which it can foster in ways that are antithetical to the fulfillment of its personal developmental function.
Also from the same book, the authors showed creativity, individualism and aggression are penalized in school:
The penalized traits (left) indicate creativity and autonomy, while the rewarded traits (right) indicate subordinacy and discipline. The data are from Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Peter Meyer, "The Long Shadow of Work: Education, the Family, and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor," The Insurgent Sociologist, Summer 1975.
School As a Tool of Cultural Genocide
From Wikipedia's article on cultural genocide:
As early as 1944, lawyer Raphael Lemkin distinguished a cultural component of genocide, which since then has become known as "cultural genocide". The term has since acquired rhetorical value as a phrase that is used to protest against the destruction of cultural heritage.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has the following major themes:
Rights of self-determination of indigenous individuals and peoples (Articles 1 - 8; 33 -34)
The difference is between the individual and people’s group
Rights of indigenous individuals and people to protect their culture through practices, languages, education, media, and religion (Articles 9 - 15, 16, 25, and 31)
Asserts the indigenous peoples’ right to own type of governance and to economic development (Articles 17 - 21, 35 -37)
Health rights (Article 23 -24)
Protection of subgroups ex. elderly, women, and children (Article 22)
Land rights from ownership (including reparation, or return of land i.e. Article 10) to environmental issues (Articles 26 -30, and 32)
Dictates how this document should be understood in future reference(Articles 38 - 46)
One of the most famous uses of school as a tool of cultural genocide is Native American Boarding Schools and Canadian Indian residential school system, though as I have previously discussed, there are many organizations today which are destroying cultures and ways of life under the banner of educating the local populations.
In the case of Canadian Indian residential school system:
The residential school system harmed Indigenous children significantly by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse, and forcibly enfranchising them. Disconnected from their families and culture and forced to speak English or French, students who attended the residential school system often graduated unable to fit into either their communities or Canadian society. It ultimately proved successful in disrupting the transmission of Indigenous practices and beliefs across generations. The legacy of the system has been linked to an increased prevalence of post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide, which persist within Indigenous communities today.
On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology on behalf of the Government of Canada and the leaders of the other federal parties in the House of Commons. Nine days prior, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to uncover the truth about the schools. The commission gathered statements from residential school survivors[nb 3] through public and private meetings at various local, regional and national events across Canada. Seven national events held between 2008 and 2013 commemorated the experience of former students of residential schools. In 2015, the TRC concluded with the establishment of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and the publication of a multi-volume report detailing the testimonies of survivors and historical documents from the time. The TRC report found that the school system amounted to cultural genocide.
Instruction provided to students was rooted in an institutional and European approach to education. It differed dramatically from child rearing in traditional knowledge systems that are generally based on 'look, listen, and learn' models. Unlike the corporal punishment and loss of privileges that characterized the residential school system, traditional approaches to education favour positive guidance toward desired behaviour through the use of game-based play, story-telling, and formal ritualized ceremonies.
Even children from western culture today have the equal following result of western schooling as the indigenous Canadian children had:
Most schools operated with the goal of providing students with the vocational training and social skills required to obtain employment and integrate into Canadian society after graduation. In actuality, these goals were poorly and inconsistently achieved. Many graduates were unable to land a job due to poor educational training. Returning home was equally challenging due to an unfamiliarity with their culture and, in some cases, an inability to communicate with family members using their traditional language. Instead of intellectual achievement and advancement, it was often physical appearance and dress, like that of middle class, urban teenagers, or the promotion of a Christian ethic, that was used as a sign of successful assimilation. There was no indication that school attendees achieved greater financial success than those who did not go to school.
In the case of Native American Boarding schools as well, psychologists believe the forced assimilation of native cultures has contributed to their high suicide rates and poverty.
As psychologist Tawa M. Witko, PhD, notes in her book, "Mental Health Care for Urban Indians: Clinical Insights From Native Practitioners" (APA, 2006), Europeans' effort to "civilize" Indians changed their culture in ways that are still being felt. In fact, until a generation ago, Indian children were still taken from their families and tribes and sent to boarding schools to assimilate into white culture. In the process, many customs that should have been handed down from generation to generation have been lost, notes Witko.
I am referring to cultural genocide in this article because I believe schooling does effect a culture's means of survival and way of life to a great extent. In previous paragraphs I discussed how modern schooling causes cultures to forget their local skill sets, in favor of modern western education, where they learn nothing useful and anything they do learn is quickly forgotten. Not only do they forget the skills they need to survive in a certain way, but the population also generally is led to believe that the previous way of survival is no longer possible. Indoctrination, covered above, is very closely linked to the cultural genocide caused by school and a factor in it. Western schools indoctrinate youth into western modes of survival. The youth pursue the western modes of survival instead of the traditional ones after and outside of school and thereby their traditional modes of survival and ways of life are lost.
Samuel Bowels and Herbert Gintis state:
The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system, we believe, through a structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production. The structure of social relations in education not only inures the student to the discipline of the work place, but develops the types of personal demeanor, modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identifications which are the crucial ingredients of job adequacy. Specifically, the social relationships of education-the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work-replicate the hierarchical division of labor. Hierarchical relations are reflected in the vertical authority lines from administrators to teachers to students. Alienated labor is reflected in the student's lack of control over his or her education, the alienation of the student from the curriculum content, and the motivation of school work through a system of grades and other external rewards rather than the student's integration with either the process (learning) or the outcome (knowledge) of the educational "production process." Fragmentation in work is reflected in the institutionalized and often destructive competition among students through continual and ostensibly meritocratic ranking and evaluation. By attuning young people to a set of social relationships similar to those of the work place, schooling attempts to gear the development of personal needs to its requirements.
With modern western education being propagandized and spread throughout the world, most likely not every single aspect of a culture will be destroyed through schooling, as it almost was in the cases of indigenous schooling in Canada and the United States, but the most important aspect will be destroyed. The way of life of the culture, the means of survival, is being destroyed through schools. This is probably the most important aspect because surviving is how humans spend the vast majority of their time, especially in the modern post industrial cultures the children are being indoctrinated into, with work being the main mode of survival. How a human spends his time is how he spends his life and effects his thoughts, emotions, psychology and health more than any other aspect of culture, for example language or art.
Besides indoctrination, how can a child help their parents on the farm, in a hunt, or in a bakery if they are in school? They can't, and with school hours and days of the year in school increasing, ways of life and cultures are being destroyed to a greater and greater extent.
Many children spend all day and night in school or working on school, with very little time to even sleep. Obviously their previous role in a culture would be eliminated if they do not have the time to participate in it.
How can a culture survive and preserve itself when its children are sent to institutions of another culture for 8 hours a day and spend the rest of the day working on assignments from that institution? At school, children they learn to participate in the other culture, and that the other culture is the better one. Does a child from a farm in India go to school to learn to be a farmer? No he goes to school and learns he should get a job working in an office in the city because it is better according to the school and the culture the school comes from, which has invaded his traditional and local culture.
Thank you for your time.
References and links
Ancient Spartan Public Education
Agoge Wikipedia - Ancient Spartan Schools
How Boarding Schools Killed the Indian Through Assimilation
A Student in a Nazi School
Education - Nazi Genrmany
School Failure and Delinquency
In Honduras, gangs control the schools and what children lean is that crime pays
Youth Gangs in School
How Public Schools Demand Failure and Perpetuate Poverty
Eduation and Wage Slavery
Murray Rothbard - Education Free and Compulsory
Schooling In Capitalist America by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
American Indian boarding schools
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada)
Cultural Genocide
Indigenous education and human rights
A struggle for hope
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