Public school is indoctrination and servitude

"The continuing cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years… By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command."



‘Conventional paradigm’ of any Social institution could be a tree. For instance, in education. “The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant’s view of the value of time, the bureaucrat’s view of the value of promotion, the salesman’s view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader’s view of the purpose of work. People are taught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hidden in the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hundreds of hours of age-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the curriculum and is graded according to his ability to submit to it.” Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 61

Schools provide a ‘luxury-knowledge package’

“Our education generally tries to train people to knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life. The minimum they receive is the amount they will need in order to function properly in their work.
In addition they are each given a ‘luxury-knowledge package’ to enhance their feeling of worth, with the size of each such package being in accord with the person’s probable social prestige. The schools are the factories in which these overall knowledge packages are produced—although schools usually claim they mean to bring the students in touch with the highest achievements of the human mind. Many undergraduate colleges are particularly adroit in nurturing these illusions. From Indian thought and art to existentialism and surrealism, a vast smorgasbord of knowledge is offered from which students pick a little here, and little there, and in the name of spontaneity and freedom are not urged to concentrate on one subject, not even ever to finish reading an entire book. (Ivan Illich’s radical critique of the school system brings many of its failing into focus.)”

“The so-called excellent students are the ones who can most accurately repeat what each of the various philosophers had to say…They do not learn to question the philosophers, to talk to them; they do not learn to be aware of the philosophers’ own contradictions, of their leaving out certain

Mass enslavement of elementarily educated minds

"Public education is the elaborate and ingenious machinery for the mass-enslavement of elementarily educated minds, which was invented in the nineteenth century for the sake of private commercial profit under a regime of laisser faire."


"The elaborate and ingenious machinery for the mass-enslavement of elementarily educated minds, which was invented in the nineteenth century for the sake of private commercial profit under a regime of laisser faire...." "The corrupting intellectual influences to which these minds become exposed when they have been educated in an elementary way all militate against the achievement of any further intellectual advance....[We] must face the prospect of an intellectual retrogression which will be a moral retrogression as well...." 197, A Study of History, Vol. 4, page 196 He points out (footnote, page 197) that "a facility in reading, in a child, spelt exposure to moral corruption." Imagine the similar, and exacerbated, moral danger of the facility of using computers and the internet.

"He excoriates, as a sign of breakdown, the kind of popular education which leads to half-educated tabloid readers, and thinks an illiterate countryman who knows his Bible is more genuinely cultured than these."