Last week I published a piece attacking the institution of systematic schooling. I scoped out its history and pointed to it as one of the root causes of ill in our society – and boy people were mad! I received the most amount of blowback for any of my pieces - and this is something to note as I have published pieces defending elitism, attacking the idea of societal progress, calling people on the left and the right mindless drones, ridiculing the very notion of identity politics, and undermining the concept of altruism. When it comes to schooling it seems that people are incredibly sensitive to their preconceived notions. However, despite all the blowback, I am only more entrenched in my views – leading me to the same question Hannibal Burress was left with when pointing out the truth.
But, but, but… what will we do without schools?!?
Antony Sutton, who was an economist and historian for over a decade with the Hoover Institution at Stanford, published numerous well-researched books showing how British and American financial and industrial interests had backed the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, assisted directly in the rise of Adolph Hitler in the 1930’s, and provided supplies that would be used against American troops in the Vietnam war. Sutton lamented that few people would believe their own eyes, let alone him, when presented with evidence against narratives that had already been pre-established within them. Information for which the groove had already been well-worn by the government, establishment interests, and the media was hard to uproot. A similar occurrence happened in my inbox over the weekend.
The largest amount of pearl clutching in reaction to my piece came from people unable to conceive of a world without schooling. Despite the fact that the institution has not existed for nearly 100% of the existence of the human species – people are unable to believe that it could be any other way. Human beings have been learning how to read and write for millennia without schooling, and certainly without a compulsory system. There is evidence that in colonial and early America before the advent of forced schooling, which is perhaps the closest approximation to a control group that we have, literacy rates were at or above 90%. When I was reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, who was considered one of the greatest orators of his time, I was astonished that he learned to read simply by observing other children reading and writing. We certainly understand that nearly all children will learn to speak by simple observation and mimicry and not through top-down national systems – why do we envision that reading and writing would be much different?
If you begin to peel back the narrative, the list of people in American history who had no formal education or very little of it (less than 2 years) is pretty astonishing. To name a few:
Benjamin Franklin
George Washington
Frederick Douglass
Abraham Lincoln
Andrew Jackson
Patrick Henry
John D. Rockefeller
Andrew Carnegie
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Thomas Edison
And it goes on. Somehow all of the above people managed to actually thrive without wasting time behind desks and mindlessly memorizing things.
In Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile he includes a chapter where he amusingly postulates that if universities could they would have lectures where Ornithologists would teach birds to fly. The metaphor is meant to show that schooling tries to ground theoretical backing to principles that come naturally to people and practitioners. Why do we believe schooling is a necessary part of begoming a functioning human being? Would any of the people on the above list have benefited from more schooling? Or would it hurt them? Are we squandering the chances for us to have another Franklin, Washington, Douglass, or Edison today because we force so many of our children through the school machine? I would attribute the lack of imagination to our world being any other way as a direct effect of schooling itself.
Aiding and Abetting Countries:
One reader of my blogpost mentioned that educational systems were necessary to assist “poor countries in Africa or Asia.” These conversations get icky to me. When people start demanding assistance for persons not their own, assuming they know what is best for them, the whole dialogue can get into some creepy places. The road to hell is paved with good intentions – how many atrocities have happened because one group or person thought they knew best about what another group should do.
Before we just go on to believe that education is the answer to the African’s problems, it may be worth some time reflecting on what caused those problems in the first place. Were Africa’s problems caused by a lack of schooling? Or is Africa in so much trouble because people seem to continuously want to “assist” it. Colonization of Africa was defended under the pretext that it was the “White Man’s Burden” to lord over the backwards people and bring them to civilization. Even today, the Gates Foundation decrees it is saving Africa (from itself?) all the while its grants to fight Malaria, HIV, and other ailments are dwarfed by their investment in oil, mining, chemical companies whose presence in Africa tend to exacerbate these issues.
Perhaps Africa’s problem is that it is getting too much of this condescending assistance. Nassim Taleb, elucidates the fact that countries tend to get rich then get educated. Indeed, I tracked in my piece how mass education tended to come after industrialization both in the US and Central Europe. Why do we believe we can simply put the cart before the horse with Africa?
A Systematic Apology of Rockefeller
A buddy of mine considers himself a decent amateur historian of the robber barons and tycoons of the 19th and 20th century. And though he concedes that Carnegie was a rather devious individual, he swears that John D. Rockefeller “was a pure Baptist, profit-seeking, value driven businessman.” And in no way was looking to corrupt society/create a permanent underclass of mindless drones through education – but rather that his motivation was always for good.
Now I am inclined to agree with him. If you look back through the piece all of the devious quotes were not made by Rockefeller himself, but rather officers who manned the tentacles of his large, far-reaching, institutional empire. I am reminded of the story of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, where armed guards, working to break up a labor strike at one of Mr. Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado slaughtered dozens of people including women and children. Rockefeller was ordered before congress to testify about the episode – however, he lived over 2,000 miles away from Ludlow and hadn’t visited the mine in over a decade. All the action that he was titularly the head of were the result an institution and actors that largely worked semi-autonomously towards the interests of Rockefeller’s empire without any one point of control.
As I looked to point out in the piece – the education system goes beyond a conspiracy of any one person or even a small group of people. My critique of Rockefeller, Gates and the like never aimed to call them evil, or even bad people necessarily – I explicitly state that later on the billionaire backers of schooling are just as much out of control of the ends of education as are the lowly teacher. A system has been put in place in which direct personal responsibility is abdicated for the system’s aims – moral agency is relinquished at the high level because if one corporation did not work to create a mindless customer and employee base then it would be outcompeted by its peers who did. For corporations, it is just doing what is in the best interest of “shareholder value” or “the bottom line.” Similarly, with phrases like “I’m just doing my job,” “it’s just business,” etc. individual agents who act as foot troops and middle management for these organizations are just as helpless and paradoxically just as much to blame.
I received a decent level of pushback for comparing good teachers to good Nazis in my piece, but the fact remains that so long as individuals actively work towards a system’s ends, no matter what their stated goals, there is little hope for change. There is a price to pay for allowing people to push forward malicious agendas while hiding behind job titles and procedure. I am not putting myself on a moral high-ground, I do the same daily in my job. Until we come to accept this rather unsettling truth, how else are we to find any hope for change? Once a system is in place no one need be at the helms. As my friend, Justin Owings, points out: systems will “do things that are fundamentally malicious. Systems will be stupid. Systems will be evil.” The only hope is that people can still work to dismantle it but that will not work by playing within the rules of the game.
Farm to (School)Table
Once a system is in place – the end results can be strange, unsettling, and far from what anyone predicted. I mentioned in the piece that in order to get standardized testing across the nation (which besides dumbing kids down allows for mass tracking) the Carnegie Foundation agreed to establish pensions for college professors and educators if the colleges agreed to make standardized testing a prerequisite for admission.
A side effect of Carnegie’s muddling with teacher’s pensions is that he founded the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America or TIAA. TIAA was started as a pension fund but is now also an insurance company, real estate investor, financial services company, and ,oddly, a bank. It is also one of the world’s largest asset managers with $1.3 trillion in funds. Nuveen, which is the Real estate arm of TIAA was one of the funds noted for gobbling up rental real estate in my You'll Own Nothing piece. Pension funds, though lacking in the notoriety of BlackRock and Vanguard, are some of the most titanic and influential pools of money in the world. Bill Gates became the US’ largest owner of farmland because he purchased land portfolios from two Canadian Pensions, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). Over a century after Carnegie founded TIAA, its reach and influence has gone much further than even he could have imagines. TIAA boasts that manages the investments of over 5 million educators, services over 15,000 institutions of higher learning, and is the #1 manager of farmland assets worldwide. The scion of Mr. Carnegie is likely in control of the food that comes across your plate. Thank god they have been honored as one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies” for 2021.