Top-Rated Free Essay
Preview

"The role of education is to produce a standard citizen and restrict dissent and originality" - Critically evaluate the view (30 Marks)

Good Essays
508 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
"The role of education is to produce a standard citizen and restrict dissent and originality" - Critically evaluate the view (30 Marks)
Education has a different meaning depending on who is doing the educating. William Torrey Harris, the once US Commissioner of Education, probably best defined education in the US in 1906 when he said that "substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
H.L. Mencken explained further in arguing that 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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
That is why, really, the only education that matters is to teach someone how to think critically. Once someone is armed with that ability, then they can seek knowledge in whatever they wish to learn, and be able to think critically in order to separate what is truth from what is fabrication. Note that the last thing a child would ever be taught in a public school is logic, rationality, and critical thinking, which would be counter to the intended goal.
Margaret Mead put it simply when she said, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
Richard Dawkins expanded on that, stating, “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”
What masquerades as education today in public schools in the Western world is, for the most part, brainwashing, subjugation, and mass control. What students do absorb in terms of basic math or language skills is minimal, as can be seen from the near-universal dumbing-down of Western society.
Look no further than the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on Education to realize that, “Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next.” If education is the means to pass along the “aims and habits of a group,” no one should ever want to be educated. What we should want is knowledge. Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, communication, association, and reasoning.
What your kids are getting, and getting good, in public school is education, not knowledge.
Sending your child to public school in the Western world is child abuse. If you must live in the Western world you have to do whatever it takes to avoid this system.
The answer generally lies in homeschooling. But, many families, forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars into the black hole of government every year for “services” such as the education system, feel trapped as most have to have both parents work just to keep the household afloat. Mothers are forced to work due to the systematic impoverishment of the family via taxes and inflation. Furthermore, they are encouraged to work through the promotion of “feminism”.
But, don’t my kids need twelve years of education, you ask? As stated above, that’s the last thing they need. What they need is knowledge, and all knowledge is free, thanks to the Internet.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Parents should allow their children to be more open-minded at a young age. For example, like Tulley said, playing with fire, they can allow them to play with fire but be right next to them so they do not get hurt.…

    • 260 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Education, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, is stated as “[the] knowledge, skill, and understanding one acquires from attending a school, college, or university.” By definition of these terms, one first would think that true education is reading, writing, and math skills students are forced to endure for twelve plus years in cold metal desks. True education, though, is the ability to question, think, and be aware of one’s self and surroundings in order to develop skills to grow and prosper. Public education in its ongoing state interrupts this process. Granted that the majority of American youth is publicly educated, public schools are the backbone of the American citizen.…

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Education allows people to learn more about themselves, and therefore, learn more about each other. Really, the only thing that makes sense in life is to strive for greater collective enlightenment. Plato shows how people become content with life’s delusions when they are not constantly seeking the truth and how experiencing new things will expand their mind to new thoughts and ideas that they were previously blind to. Frederick Douglass shows how humans can use the lack of education to keep others in the dark and only through education can those people break free. Thomas Newman presents the idea that once you are educated, you shouldn’t be satisfied and you should continue to seek out new forms of knowledge. These three author’s ideas collectively…

    • 163 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Education should be used with a purpose and that purpose is to learn, to educate, and to help students become successfully academically. However, that is not always the case. Education at times is used for all the wrong reasons. “Repeatedly, Americans have followed a common pattern in devising educational prescriptions for specific social or economic ills. Once they had discovered a problem, they labeled it and taught a course on the subject: alcohol or drug instruction to fight addictions; sex education to combat syphilis or AIDS; home economics to lower the divorce rate; driver education to eliminate carnage on the highway; and vocational training or…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This controlled learning environment that is forced upon the future generations by the government is the largest aspect that this community uses. The education system that was chosen was designed to lead to widespread ignorance…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Education has always been a basic human right, across every society around the world. We have always needed to disseminate information and teach people about different skills in order to perpetuate our societies, as they cannot function if people will never go beyond the basics and specialize. However, it is also because of education that we become more holistic people, taking in new ideas and thinking about them, allowing us to develop ourselves as an individual. This is why education is important in creating informed citizens within our own societies, creating our individual “voice” and instigate change within our societies. James Baldwin’s article “A Talk to Teachers” stresses this, as he discusses that education is important in the…

    • 1192 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Prescribed Title

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Although many people believe that knowledge is gained through the average educational facilities, this is not always true. It is through experience, which is a form of empirical knowledge, that we actually learn and gain knowledge. “Experience is the accumulated pool of observations, associations, habits, skills, and judgments from which we draw recollections, hunches, expectations, and so on” (Dunn 53). This is the basis of everything we know. For example, we do not know that a stove is hot until we touch it, and it causes pain to our body. Through sense perception, we learn that we should not touch a hot stove, and therefore gain that knowledge. The education we receive in schools is not considered knowledge without experience. We can learn as much information as possible, but still not gain knowledge. Information can be described as experience, observations, data, and facts that have not yet been processed. (Dunn 9) With all the information we gain in school, we must apply it into the real world. Humans are an odd species that seem not to take what other people say as being true. Even if we have been told that we must not do something, we tend to rebel against society, and take actions that result in negative consequences. It is…

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The understanding of the conservation of water wasn’t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences” (Haidt 6). This explains that children learn the differences between right and wrong by themselves, but it depends on their own experiences. It basically explains that morality is nature and nurture. Kids know, but their guardians and friends give them the experiences to learn what is right and…

    • 686 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Philosophy paper

    • 265 Words
    • 2 Pages

    I believe that children learn best when they are taught under certain conditions and in certain ways. Some of these are……

    • 265 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Evidence of the failure of public education is all around us, from the glaring negligence…

    • 1459 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Too often public education is debated on the narrow terrain of what individuals already hold true.…

    • 674 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Nowadays reading and writing is not a privilege or a status, it is a way of communication and a significant part of our everyday life. Time when most of literate and educated people were from wealthy and privileged families is long gone. It is no longer the case when people from less fortunate families would be bound to do a hard labor and never get a chance to get a proper education.…

    • 1164 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Public Education Reform

    • 1732 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Intro: America is facing an ominous problem regarding education. Over the past few decades the standard for American public education has steadily declined. There are many who do not recognize or refuse to recognize that there is an evident need for a reform. Martin Gross, the author of the Conspiracy of Ignorance, writes that the reality is parents are not witnessing their children become properly educated. In reality, they are…

    • 1732 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Learning is not only an essential skill to survive, it is also a requirement to attain a fulfilled life. Yet the public education system, where the majority of people are expected to learn, often overlook the process of learning. It is no wonder why one of the most accomplished thinkers, Albert Einstein, has said, “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” (qtd. In Silber 130). This quote embodies the current state of public education in the United States; a system that approaches learning as “one size fits all” and focuses on the wrong aspects of standardized testing, which hinders the quality of learning. Unquestionably, the learning process is not discussed widely amongst the public, since ignorance of its existence…

    • 1833 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    When you build from an education you can either decide what to learn from it, or completely loose it at all which is one of the leading causes to controversy towards this topic. We live in an era where there’s an abundance amount of opportunities available that people actually start to forget that they exist and they choose to not take advantage of it. It's like when students in a high school are given free public education, where they decide what to learn and take from it in order to grow and expand plans for the future careers of the new generation. But most scholars today are blind and don't see the obvious purpose for this type of education, most students in their high school years waste their time not caring whether they've done their class work for the day or not, they've rather socialize in the hallways with others students just like them. I'll give you a certain point in my life where I asked my parents about education and why is it important. They gave me a simple response and told me “it's the key to every unlocked door you could have ever imagined of and with that key holds the power of your education to be able to open that door.” It’s back when my parents were younger that you had to actually pay for a proper education, not many people where they lived had…

    • 1435 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays