Promulgating ignorance in the name of education
"... let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the
means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody
because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be"-- Machiavelli
The question is - why are most of the citizenry taken in by what should be obvious lies?
Consider: In the world’s wealthiest nation, approximately one in four adults cannot read a newspaper or fill out a job application, and are therefore by definition functionally illiterate. Roughly 50% of adults in that country cannot read or comprehend above the eighth grade level. Over 70% possess no post-secondary credential of any kind. 87% of all books are read by less than 10% of the population. Less than 1% have ever read a book on science. Less than seventy-five percent of hospital patients are sufficiently literate to read through a standard consent form. The vast majority are ignorant or the simplest facts about the world, their country, historical (vs. revisionist) fact, political or social realities, or even the most elementary science.
A primary reason for this mass illiteracy and ignorance is that during the years when the largest number of vertical strata cortical connections are formed most are taken by force, and placed in a pedagogical Panopticon where they are required to obey, follow arbitrary rules, and memorize what are presented as ‘facts’, rather than as a particular Weltanschauung.
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim ..., whatever pretensions of politicians, pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." — H.L. Mencken, writing in 1924 [68]
Pedagogy has become a system of purposeful adulteration and sublimation of the very concept that there could exist factually correct information contrary to the expounded social narrative. Although there exist some few exceptions, for the most part the might of acculturation in the subtle sway of a hidden curriculum determines both individual perception and apperception. The pedagogical system, the habitus (to use Bourdieu’s term), and the ontological insistence of this hidden curriculum rests upon and perpetuates debasement of non-valuative noesis.
Learning, knowledge, grace, and human excellence has seldom emerged from this restrictive, coercive environment. Rather, the antithesis of human potential becomes normative. Graduates for the most part, habituated to the doxal inculcation of convention become the perpetuators of neo-catechumenatism guised as knowledge and learning.
True debate or pursuit of truth rarely arises from a graduate community selected and streamed by such a system. Most are ill suited for the ultimate heights of true scholarship and learning, but well acculturated to societal role, expectation, and ontological outlook.
It is an axiom that absolutism manifests automatically within an enforced (however subtly) harmonized pluralism. How much more so when that is compelled by a pedagogy devoted to narrative acculturation within subscribed doxa.
"In relation to the political decontamination of our public life,
the government will embark upon a systematic campaign
to restore the nation’s moral and material health.
The whole educational system ...
will be used as a means to this end." — Adolf Hitler
The success of doxally harmonized pluralism in most pedagogical systems and the
kakistocracy so engendered, is manifest in the numbers supra. And in the resultant society.
