If you're still in school, let me tell you a little secret: Nothing you do has any real consequences. If you skip school, you might get given out to, but they're really powerless to do anything, unless you get expelled (and they'll suspend you first, believe me). It's not going to affect you later in life. No future employer cares if you skipped school a few times when you were 16 or caused a bit of mayhem, no matter what you're told. They wish they did it themselves. Schools need to maintain the illusion of power. If your education is anything like mine was, you'll live to regret not causing more trouble in school.

The problem with education, in Ireland at least, is that it is not education at all. History is the best example of this. As you might have guessed, a lot of stuff has happened in the course of mankind's history, and not all of the facts can be told. Only a subset can be presented to you, and this subset of facts are relative to your culture, carefully arranged to initiate you into your society's perspective of the world.

I have since learned that many things in our history books are tainted this way. Columbus "discovering" America, the invention of the printing press, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Irish perspective on British oppression, and that's only the beginning.

I began to realise this when I picked up a history book used in British schools, which leaves out all of the atrocities committed against the Irish, and only discusses IRA bombs in England etc, and these events in turn are conveniently excluded from the Irish texts. I was amazed to discover how many British people still believe that Ireland is a part of Britain.

We studied Yeats for two years, and NEVER was his drug use, induced visions, automatic writing or his work with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn mentioned. No wonder I never enjoyed his work until now. English texts such as Catcher in the Rye are prescribed to "help" the pupil to negotiate the chasm between childhood and adulthood, or in other words to destroy any remaining teenage dreams of bucking the system. The aim is to defeat the student and to make him into a fine-upstanding-citizen.

Education is Indoctrination.

What is the nature of this system, and who are the perpetrators?

This system is self-perpetuating, accelerated now and brought to the brink in the last 200 years by the industrial revolution. Industrial society requires progress and competition to survive, and so it needs X amount of mathematicians and Y amount of engineers to continue. This is why those who are not predisposed to maths are made to suffer through it far beyond their level of ability in the subject.

Exam results in Ireland are so competitive now that some college courses have have hit the maximum 600 points, meaning that if a student got A1s in all subjects (quite a feat), they still might not qualify for their course. Doing reasonably well in the Leaving Certificate exam means cramming facts into your head for 8 to 10 solid hours per day for months. Many people do not cope well with the stress, and some students suffer illness from stress, or mental breakdown (I'm on that list). There is an exam-related suicide every one or two years. This is either accepted or ignored by society, I'm not sure which.

This is the climatic ending to Irish education, which has condemned children to sit quietly in dull classrooms all day for 13 years, when they should have been outside playing and learning. The perpetrators are those who have gone through the same process/system that you are going through. In systematic terms, it is positive feedback. In plain english, the prisoners build the prison. And the more time you spend listening, complying and attending school, the more the infectious process of conditioning (grown-up word for brainwashing) takes over you.

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks" - Woodrow Wilson

For much of the 18th century, Prussia was one of the best countries in Europe. They had the best food, the best language, the best culture, and overall regarded themselves as the best of everything. In 1806, they were pwned by the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte.

This was a severe blow to the Prussian image. How on Earth could they have been beaten by the uncouth French? Were Napoleon's combat tactics superior? The answer is "Yes", but Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Address to the German Nation of 1806 blamed the fall of Prussia on the fragmentation of the German people into small states, which he blamed on the manipulations of foreign powers. In order for Prussia to stand strong, all German speakers would have to be united.

One of the ways the Prussians set out to attain this goal was by a massive reform of the state education system. Thanks to Fredrick II, Prussia had had a mass education system since 1763. By 1819, this had been completely overhauled, just in time for the Industrial Revolution.

Under the old system, education was book-centric, with the teacher acting as a guide to help the children learn on their own. Under the new, innovative system, the teacher was placed at the centre of the children's education. It was now the teacher who decided what they would learn and how they would learn it. This served to foster intellectual dependence, as children were dependent on an authority figure to dispense knowledge and provide their lives with meaning.

In addition, the increased importance of the teacher instilled emotional dependence, as they decided what the children were allowed to do and say, as well as such things as when they would be allowed to use the bathroom. These forces came together to produce a country of highly disciplined, ordered workers and soldiers eager to take orders from superiors instead of thinking and learning for themselves. As a result, Prussia came to dominate Europe politically and militarily as it annexed all the other German-speaking states except Austria, thus forming Germany.

Other countries, seeing how effective this system was in strengthening Prussia/Germany, adopted similar systems. Education systems based on the Prussian model appeared in America in 1837 in Massachusetts, in China in 1862, and Japan and Britain in 1870, from which the system spread to Ireland, Australia, India, and Pakistan. Russia adopted the system after the Communist uprisings.

And thus we arrive at the situation today, where the education system is designed to encourage rote memorization, regurgitation of facts without any true understanding, and emphasis on pleasing our superiors and meeting arbitrary goals, such as the Leaving Certificate.

One thing worth noting is that in universities and institutes of technology, an approach to learning effective in schools tends to utterly fail. If you want to properly learn at such an institution, you have to research and study by yourself and find new and interesting information, and also present it in a manner that shows independent thought. People who attend grind schools and gain 600 points in the Leaving Cert are the most likely to fail and drop out of university, because they're so used to being spoon-fed that they have no idea how to truly learn. For those of us fortunate enough to have retain some spark of curiosity through school, such an experience is a true eye-opener.

Still, things aren't perfect. As big business becomes ever more dominant in today's world, even university education is slipping into the indoctrination described in this and oldmaneinstein's writeups. To tell the truth, the idea of getting a job in which I work under my own initiative scares me a bit. IS that because of indoctrination, or do I just suck? Hard to say.

Sources

• Some lessons form the underground history of American education - John Taylor Gatto, published in Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, 2003, Disinformation Books. Edited by Russ Kick


• Apt Pupils - Robert Sterling, published in You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes, and Cultural Myths, 2001. Edited by Russ Kick.