Here’s an excellent page: http://www.holisticeducator.com/schooling.htm
and here’s a paragraph from it:
“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of the sun and moon but by the factory whistle and the clock.The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world…The most criticized feature of education today – the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading, and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher – are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time…”
A quote from Alvin Tofler.
“the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed”
Well said. Very well put. Precisely it.
We are and we are producing ‘the kind of adults needed’ for industrialism.
NOT the kind of adults needed for ‘ a better world’ , ‘ a better human’, ‘ a happier person’ – or any other catch-phrase, concept, notion you may come up with.
We are purely the product of a need for a slave to service machines.
And so successful has it all been that no one, I imagine, virtually no one, questions this any more. No one doubts it. No one is ‘unhappy’.
The slaves accept their lot and know only it and are satisfied by it.
Every year, every decade, every generation seeks for less and less and gets less and less and becomes more and more faceless clones and machine-slaves, virtual components of the machines.
The change is so rapid.
In my life I have seen it.
The change from people meeting and talking, discussing, knowing and wanting to know, exploring, thinking, questioning – to people meeting and sitting in silence watching a television.
I well remember the shock I felt when it first happened in my life. When I first began visiting people and finding them in darkened rooms watching the television with the injunction ‘don’t talk’ , ‘be quiet’.
I couldn’t understand how they could find watching those (in those days black and white) pictures more interesting, more ‘real’, than looking at each other, talking with each other, being active, being in the world.
I remember when a man (especially a young man, starting out) went out looking for work full of confidence, expectation, happiness – fully expecting to find himself wanted, accepted, useful.
And finding just that. Being invited in here and there to join the work, trained on the job. In hard times work found for him if a full time job couldn’t be found.
Now anyone, everyone, knows it is hopeless to look for work unless you are armed with all kinds of qualifications. You are not valued. You are not given a job. Your qualifications are valued and are given a job. Only the function you will perform is valued and is given a job.
I remember when home lots in Australia were a quarter acre. That’s about 1000 square metres. Nowadays a ‘traditional lot’ in Ipswich, Queensland can be as small as 450 square metres. And ‘cottage lots’ can be less than 300 square metres. See here: http://www.weplan.com.au/minimum-lot-size-ipswich
That’s all here in Australia.
Once Australians occupied bigger homelots. Once they had better work prospects. Once they had more freedoms. Once they had better working conditions and salaries. Once Australia was better and was on its way UP and better yet, in everyone’s mind.
But that upward trend has finished and now Australia has joined the ‘developed’ world in the ‘cloning’ and ‘depersonalising’ and ‘economic rationalising’ and ‘monetarising’ trends.
If must not be forgotten, of course, that immediately prior to the great times in Australia the people in the ‘old world’ – i.e. England – did not enjoy anything much at all.
Small pokey terraced houses, primitive harsh working conditions for six days a week. A class ridden society.
Prior to the World Wars it was fairly terrible. After the World Wars it was still pretty bad.
Hence Australia was truly a paradise. A pinnacle.
My point is that it has turned out that it was indeed a pinnacle, and we’re coming down the other side now.
And the thing is the crushing, deadening, stultifying silence, the apathy, the lack of awareness or concern – it is like we are all opiated out of existence.
But while we are dumb obedient opiated clones the rest of the world represents the ‘barbarians’ of old – tumultuous, undisciplined, irreverent, hungry, fierce, needy, desperate.
The result seems fore ordained, doesn’t it? But no. I think not. The world is not as it ever was. Now we don’t have soft, sybaritic civilization and hungry barbarians free to roam and conquer.
We have hard monster machines served perhaps by soft, servile unknowing, unquestioning creatures – but the machines themselves are hard and cruel and controlled by masters of the same ilk.
The barbarians will have to try to take down those machines.
Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing now, with all this ‘terrorism’, except that the world’s terrorist crisis or war seems nothing more than a hysterical media beat up when you look at it. The traffic fatalities in any country being far more than anything attributable to terrorism.
The terrorism thing seems like a sideline, a sideshow, organised to deflect our attention.
No, the real ‘barbarians’ are just what’s left of real humanity, of real people, here on the planet. People who have not been seduced by tv and cinema and alcohol and whatever – and who haven’t been trained from birth to be servile servants of the machine – and who have interests that go further than playing with their fashionable toys of the day…
The barbarians of today don’t look like barbarians of old. They are no longer fierce bearded warriors mounted on shaggy horses and bearing long rifles and swords and plundering, raping, killing – no.
It is strange that our ‘terrorists’ are presented to us in that likeness, isn’t it? Afghani Taliban or Al Qaeda, dressed in flowing robes, bearded, fierce countenance, long rifle even, sword or dagger even…
A joke.