Conflict One: Education

What they forgot to mention…

‘When I was young, it seemed thatLife was so wonderful,

A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.And all the birds in the trees,

Well they’d be singing so happily,Joyfully, playfully watching me.

But then they send me awayTo teach me how to be sensible,

Logical, responsible, practical.And they showed me a world

Where I could be so dependable,Clinical, intellectual, cynical.’

Supertramp, The Logical Song(Released 1979)

‘The ruling class was still the ruling class. Despite the variety of the 1945 cabinet, Britain in the forties and fifties was a society run mostly by

cliques and groups of friends who had first met at public schools and Oxbridge… Schools such as

Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only 5 per cent of the population, but they still

provided the majority of political leaders…’

Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain

Traditionally, ‘the chief nurse of England's statesmen’, Eton College near Windsor boasts among its former pupils eighteen British Prime Ministers, members of royal families (both British and foreign) and countless Barons, Dukes, Earls and Viscounts. The powerful send their children to Eton

‘The ruling class was still the ruling class. Despite the variety of the 1945 cabinet,

Britain in the forties and fifties was a society run mostly by cliques and groups of friends who had first met at public schools

and Oxbridge… Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only

5 per cent of the population, but they still provided the majority of political leaders…’

Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain

Traditionally, ‘the chief nurse of England's statesmen’, Eton College near Windsor boasts among its former pupils eighteen British Prime Ministers, members of royal families (both British and foreign) and countless Barons, Dukes, Earls and Viscounts. The powerful send their children to Eton

‘This is a really good lesson,’ I said to a boy I was sitting next to on the back row during one such visit. ‘It bloody well ought to be,’ he replied, ‘we’ve been practising it for weeks’.

Former Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead, Class War

If, from its inception, the agenda of Eton is to take the privileged cream of society and groom them to lead us, it begs the question – what is the agenda behind compulsory state schooling?

‘Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished… when the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects without the need of armies or policemen.’

Prussian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

In 1806 the Prussians were defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena and then humiliated by the subsequent Treaty of Tilsit, which shrunk the German state to half its former size and population. The blame for the defeat lay, it was believed, in Prussian soldiers thinking for themselves. To stop this from ever happening again, it was decided that the country’s children should undergo eight years of compulsory schooling, emphasising obedience, duty, respect for authority and the ability to follow orders

‘Give me the boy for seven years and I will give you the man.’

Jesuit saying

‘Kantorek was our form-master at school, a short, strict man who wore a grey frock-coat and had a shrewish face… Kantorek kept on lecturing at us in the PT lessons until the entire class marched under his leadership down to the local recruiting office and enlisted. I can still see him, his eyes shining at us through his spectacles and his voice trembling with emotion as he asked, ‘You’ll all go, won’t you lads?’

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

‘In the domain of primary and technical education, Germany has also become the universal teacher of Europe.’

German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908)

The powerful were so impressed with the effects of Prussian schooling that they have imposed it on children to this day

‘Their Lordships are strongly of the opinion that no plan of education ought to be encouraged in which intellectual instruction is not subordinate to the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrines and precepts of revealed religion.’

Instruction to Her Majesty’s school inspectors issued on July 4, 1840. My emphasis

'Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor... would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them fractious and refactory.’

Bodmin MP Davies Giddy debating the Parochial Schools Bill, Hansard, House of Commons, Vol 9, July 13 1807. In 1870 the Elementary Education Act was passed, making schooling compulsory for all in English schools. But where some MPs, landowners and industrialists saw danger in an educated poor becoming aware of their subordinate ‘lot in life’,others saw opportunity – themass indoctrination of theworking class

‘Hardly had the clock struck nine when the voices of the children in the playground hushed… the voice of the master can only be heard. In simple military movements the children entered in decent order ‘Right turn. March!’ They marched upstairs like an army of miniatures. Every one to his place without noise or confusion. Some seated themselves at desks, others stood in rows or half circles mindful always to place their toes upon a chalk line marked on the floor for that purpose.’

Sheffield Independent, November 6, 1873

‘Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.’

American educational reformer Horace Mann (1796-1859)

‘Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.’

American educational reformer John Dewey(1859-1952)

‘Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.’

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)

‘In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to ourmolding hands. The present educational conventions (intellectual and

character education) fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition wework our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.

We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men

of learning or men of science…’

‘…We have not to raise up from among themauthors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor

lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before

ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers

and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.’

John D Rockefeller's General Education Board's first mission statement (Occasional Letter Number One), dated 1906. The son of a snake oil confidence trickster,

John D Rockefeller (1839 – 1937) was the pioneerof the multinational corporation and the world’s richest

man. He was the first billionaire

‘The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of

the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be

interdependent.’

John Dewey, 1899

‘We believe that education is one of the principal causes of

discontent of late years manifesting itself among the

laboring classes.’

1888 Senate Committeeon Education

‘I said, now watch what you say orthey’ll be calling you a radical,

A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal.’

The Logical Song, Supertramp

‘We want one class to have aliberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of liberal education andfit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.’

President Woodrow Wilson, 1909 speech to teachers

‘Meek and obedient you follow the leaderDown well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.’

Pink Floyd, Sheep

‘Ninety-nine (learners) out of a hundred are automata,

careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the

prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of

substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the

subsumption of the individual.’

William Torrey Harris,US Commissioner of

Education from 1889 to 1906 The Philosophy of Education

‘robot/robot/   • noun a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.   — DERIVATIVES robotize (also robotise) verb.   — ORIGIN from Czech robota ‘forced labour’; the term was coined in K. &Chacek;apek’s play R.U.R. ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (1920)’

Compact Oxford English Dictionary

‘The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.’

William Torrey Harris

‘Look againat the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion,class position, indifference, emotionaland intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the centre of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its original purpose: to regulate the poor.’

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down. Gatto was named ‘New York State Teacher of the Year’ in 1991

‘In obedience there is always fear,and fear darkens the mind.’

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), Beginnings of Learning

‘(Alexander Inglis) wrote that the new schools were being expressly created to serve a command economy and command society, one in which the controlling coalition would be drawn from important institutional stakeholders in the future. According to Inglis, the first function of schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority. This prepares the young to accept whatever management dictates when they are grown. Second is the diagnostic function. School determines each student’s ‘proper’ social role, logging it mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function, sorting. Individuals are to be trained only so far as their likely destination in the social machine, not one step beyond…’

‘…Conformity is the fourth function. Kids are to be made alike, not from any passion for egalitarianism, but so future behaviour will be predictable, in service to market and political research… And last is the propaedutic function, a fancy word meaning that a small fraction of kids will slowly be trained to take over management of the system, guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle.’

John Taylor Gatto,The Underground History of American Education

‘Ever wonder why we go to school?... Its societies way of turning all the young people into good little robots and factory workers that’s why we sit in desks in rows and go by bell schedules, to get prepared for the real world cause ‘that’s what its like’.’

Eric Harris, shooter at the Columbine High School massacre, in his journal

This page: plans for a prison. Despite being led blindly into the horrors of World War One,

Germany - the cradle of this global method of control – had not shaken free from the headlock

of a state education given over to complete domination of the individual. Indeed, a

generation later, the indoctrinated population showed how much further a people would go when fear, hate and mental manipulation are

allowed free reign

This has been an extract from Conflict, a photo-documentary by Neil Jackson. Click here to view. Class dismissed