Back to School

Is school the ‘tape worm of the people’, much as religion was once the opiate?

Does school extract vitality leaving tractable units of taxable activity (except for those so alienated, they can only do nihilism and crime)?

 I have looked before at the ‘sprit and sludge’, output polarity of schooling, but let’s look again at universal institutionalisation. Is it far more insidious than anyone realises? (Might Machiavellian Tony have intuited this with his: “education, education, education”?

 Might the acceptance of ‘school’ and ‘schooling’, as words to convey the idea of development of knowledge (even wisdom) and competent thinking in the Everyman-mind, be more telling than we ever pause to consider?

 Why is our ‘processing’ of young minds not called by some word meaning ‘making whole’ or ‘completing’ or ‘potentiation’? Clearly, school does none of the foregoing, and ‘schooling’ means no more than the gathering-up that precedes whatever it is we actually do to our young.

 If schooling was first established under the Church, to mould cowering souls into compliance, with a side-line in the learning of useful skills, might the secular state simply have taken over, with little change in ethos? Is the intent of Westminster to mould every child, to be readily bent to the will of the state?

 If so: has the state succeeded in this task, way beyond our faintest cognising? Is this why manifest corruption in diverse state-mediated arenas (police, commerce, advertising, banking, healthcare, etc) does not lead to mass protest, confrontation, and insurrection?

 Are we irrevocably supine? If not, what is required to awaken the sleep-walking citizenry to the iniquities of Westminster tyranny? An answer to that question could prove the first step on a journey of a thousand miles; a journey away from this dismal place.