First of all, this isn’t simply another one of those dumb-fuck conspiracy theories by the QAnon brain-dead. I used to be a lot more susceptible to conspiracy theories in my 20s but have long since matured. Yet, there has been a nagging question in the back of my mind for decades & that is, is there a conspiracy by the power elite to keep the public dumbed-down or is it merely the unfortunate confluence of several negative forces, a coincidence if you will?
In a very real sense, my entire life has been centered around the subject of education. From kindergarten on, I have been madly in love with education & this love has propelled me forward ever since. In fact, looking back, it’s probably also a factor in my initial attraction to the lady who was to become my wife.
From the moment Jeri & I were dancing in the nightclub where I met her, we were exchanging ideas about education & travel. She was teaching Special Education at a high school & I was a college student still trying to find myself. And with her love for me & belief in me, I finally became serious about college & began to pursue my B.A. in earnest.
Around the same time, I developed an interest in politics & Reagan who was the former governor of our state, was elected president. Ronnie was the first president who truly worried me because I could see that he was clearly on the side of the rich & the powerful. He was brazen in his war against the poor & the working class & around this same time, I had also stumbled upon the subject of philosophy.
Prior to philosophy, nothing really stirred my spirit in college but with philosophy I thought, now this is something I can really sink my teeth into. And Socrates, the “Father of Western Philosophy,” was like a lighthouse on a dark, stormy night for a ship desperately trying to find a safe harbor.
No disrespect intended but for those of you who may not be aware of Socrates’ story, I’m going to give a thumb-nail sketch here. Note before I get started that Athens was Socrates’ home & it was also where our form of government, Democracy, was born. Socrates loved to think & he loved to inspire others to think not just on the usual, superficial level, but on a much deeper level so ideally, they could have a true or honest discussion about serious matters.
As a matter-of-fact, I believe that Noam Chomsky, often referred to as the greatest living intellectual on the planet & I’m very proud to claim as a friend, is similar to Socrates in that his constant probing is his way of empowering ourselves. And like Socrates who was loved & respected by roughly half of Athens, Chomsky is either loved or feared & hated by a large proportion of people because he doesn’t pull his punches.
Socrates spent his days wandering the streets of Athens & followed by young men who enjoyed watching him cut the arrogant & ignorant down to size intellectually. For example, a man could become well-known & respected as a master shipbuilder but he’d think therefore he was entitled to pontificate on everything from how to properly raise a child to how to strategize for a war campaign.
Naturally, Socrates public humiliation which revealed their ignorance & pomposity created a number of enemies for Socrates though he didn’t set out to publicly ridicule them, he simply let them hang themselves or reveal their ignorance all on their own. And again, Chomsky pretty much does the same.
One of Socrates’ central or core stratagems in his attempts to wake people up was to always come back to the definition of a word or a concept. Many, if not most people use words assuming that they’re understood universally & agreed upon. Words like freedom, truth, beauty, etc. But with a little digging & more in depth conversations, it soon becomes evident that two people in a conversation or a debate, could hold two entirely different perspective on key words/concepts they are discussing or arguing about.
Well eventually, Socrates’ detractors grew to such a large number that he was charged with; “Socrates was accused of impiety against the traditional Greek religion, of acting (as a member of the Popular Assembly) against the will of the people, of speaking against the democratic idea of elections, and of corrupting the young to his own beliefs. “
As to the charge of impiety, it’s obvious that religion still exerts a powerful control over our lives i.e. every politician must include in their speeches, “God bless America.” I don’t want to wander too far afield re: the will of the people or the democratic idea of elections but as for corrupting the young to his own beliefs, this is key.
Obviously, Socrates’ teaching was the antithesis of “belief” and what he was truly guilty of was teaching people to question authority. This of course pissed-off the leaders of Athens who like all leaders, want total obedience & no questioning of their authority.
A cursory review of history shows that the Church & the State have vied for power over the public continuously & at times, they have united in their suppression of the public & those have been the worst of times for humanity. In the U.S., the powers that be passed a law that all children of school age must attend public school. Why? It certainly isn’t because they give a damn about the education of our children though they constantly proclaim it is, no, it’s quite simply because young children are far more susceptible to indoctrination when they’re young.
Now this is most likely where you may think I’ve gone off the rails into conspiracy land but I assure you, no, I haven’t & here are just a couple of examples to support my contention.
Back around 1974, I was interviewing for a job & the guy seemed fairly openminded & I learned that he was president of the local school district. I had read, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown & I took a chance. I asked him directly, why do they teach us lies about the so-called “Winning of the West,” and etc. His reply was simple & direct, “Because most students don’t go on to college & the government wants students to leave public school with a good feeling about their country.”
I was surprised at his candor & the matter-of-fact tone in which he spoke about it. I thought, Jesus Christ, this is a Hispanic guy who must be aware of how fucked-over his race has been by the White men yet it doesn’t seem to matter to him?
Continuing on, years later I read John Taylor Gatto’s classic, “The Underground History of American Education.” This book totally blew my mind & was a real eye-opener. In fact, I wrote a book on the subject using Gatto’s book as the skeleton or outline upon which I created my book but I haven’t gotten around to editing it yet. Here are just a couple of things that I learned from Gatto’s monumental work.
Our illustrious president, Woodrow Wilson who ran for the presidency promising to keep America out of WWI but once in office, promptly turned around & got us involved in “the war to end all wars,” had this to say about public education;
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
― Woodrow Wilson
If this isn’t clear enough for you to see or understand what I’m trying to convey in this essay, then I don’t know what would be? The important thing to note in this quote from President Wilson is that he, like the other rulers of America over the years, wasn’t attempting to hide his true beliefs. Obviously this isn’t a conspiracy in the usual sense or understanding of the word. No, rather it is a conspiracy hiding in plain sight. A declaration if you will of what the power elite truly believe i.e. they are superior beings & the rest of us, the 99%, are here to serve them & make them wealthier.
As an aside, friends over the years have come to me for answers because they know how deeply I love education & my advice has often been; 1)read to your children when they’re young & let them see you reading on a regular basis 2)study the subjects you didn’t do well in when you were in school 3) and study what the rich study.
And no, I’m not talking about the obvious subjects like accounting, economics, etc. that many of the rich studied & became rich because of it because that’s just a glorified version of a trade school. Yes, study economics, finance, etc. but the true source of their wealth lies in the classics of the humanities in the academic disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, etc.
Unfortunately, far too many people dismiss the humanities as useless pursuits but they couldn’t be more wrong. Quite simply, the humanities are about humanity or people, their common dreams, fears, worries, etc. and since all business boils down to people, mostly how to manipulate & control them so you can sell them your products or services, the better you understand people, the better your chances of success in business.
Personally, I enjoy the humanities because I am a utopian or an idealist & want to see humanity become more harmonious & less at the mercy of the greedy & the merciless. But in general, the more we can arm or empower ourselves intellectually, the greater our chances of survival.
Another example of the conspiracy against us is something else I learned from Mr. Gatto, for the sake of brevity because I’m all too aware of how short people’s attention spans have become, I’m going to lay it out short & sweet. Four of America’s most notorious or famous Robber Barons depending on your perspective were Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, & Morgan. These “titans of industry,” like the master shipbuilder in Socrates’ day, felt they were naturally the founts of wisdom in regards to the proper education of our young.
And because a lot of their wealth derived from the factory system model in terms of how to run a successful business, they believed the same system could be employed in educating American students. The covert curriculum was very basic & consisted of punctuality, obedience, & repetitive work.
This just reminded me of another personal experience. I worked as a cub reporter for the little paper in Paramount, CA where I attended school from the 6th grade to graduation & I was interviewing the principal of my old high school one day. I asked him why Paramount High School didn’t offer classes like trigonometry, calculus, physics, etc. & he replied matter-of-factly that it was because we were an industrially-zoned city. So, our students were on a vocational track.
The more I thought about his reply in the months & years that followed, the more angry I became. You see, when I first started going to college, I wanted to become a forest ranger but I soon learned that I should’ve taken those classes that I mentioned above, while in high school. Moreover, when I was in the sixth grade, I scored in the 11th grade, sixth month level in reading. But never once was I encouraged or told about other possible options to make the best use of my intelligence. In short, these bastards were playing God with not only my life but the lives of countless others.
In conclusion, the inspiration for writing this essay came from a book I recently started reading titled, “The Hidden History of Neoliberalism” by Thom Hartmann. And on page 18, Mr. Hartmann states;
“… the ‘creeds’ of the modern democracies of the 1940s that were expanding government services like free health care and education for working class people threatened to destroy ‘freedom of thought and expression’ and could only lead to totalitarianism.”
This passage struck me like a thunderbolt & I thought, here it is & as obvious as the nose on my face, the “freedom of thought & expression,” they are speaking of is only meant for the wealthy. The rest of us aren’t worthy of such noble ideals & should be content with our lots in life like the peasants & serfs of the feudal age.
The “elite” proclaim ad nauseam that the rest of us are too lazy or too stupid to know how to run our lives because if we weren’t, we’d be rich like them. Leaving out inconvenient truths like the fact that they have stood on our throats with their boots from the day we were born until the day we die.
Of course the charade or the façade of freedom, equality, justice, etc. must be maintained so when a politician is running for office, these worn-out platitudes are given lip-service. Yet underneath it all, the 1% have been waging a non-stop, underground war against public education. But Trump didn’t give a shit & didn’t even bother to hide his contempt for public education & appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.
What’s to be done? Well, it’s always been the same answer, we must take our own education as well as the education of our loved ones into our own hands. Yep! No simple remedy my friend, just plain, old fashioned work & ingenuity if we are to survive individually & collectively? Here’s a gem from Doris Lessing, a favorite author of one of my favorite professors when I was an undergrad in English literature, Roy Garrot;
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
— Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR December 27, 2022
P.S. here’s a quote from Rockefeller, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” By-the-way, when is the last time you heard of a new weapons system that was denied because “we just can’t afford it?” Why not? Because the military-industrial complex is owned by the 1% & every new weapons system is cash in the bank for these unholy scum & another working class student is denied a chance to make something of their life. And this isn’t some secret conspiracy, it’s perfectly legal because they are the only law that matters in this corrupt nation under God!