Now a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And it's often spread by reading. Flash forward to the heyday of the plantation system in the American South. Not only were slaves forbidden to read, it was against the law to teach them to do so. And even after the slaves had been "freed" there was still that nasty literacy requirement if one wanted to vote, which worked very well up until the Civil Rights Movement kicked its sorry ass. But nota bene, this speed bump in the pathway of democracy is once again rearing its ugly head in many parts of the US in more subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste - or to have deliberately stolen from you via mis-education: whole word, or reading in context, where there is no context in which to decipher the meaning of a word because you can't read the words which make up its context; no memorization of times tables to make it easier to do math because that's what a calculator is for (what if you haven't got one?); you don't have to be able to tell time because it's all digital now; no real history so you won't be able to evaluate the actions of your erstwhile leaders and "representatives" in any sort of context. "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history" - George Bernard Shaw That's because we're fed a redacted fairy tale version of it written by the perpetrators.
"The term indoctrination came to have awkward connotations during the 20th century, but it is necessary to retain it, in order to distinguish it from education. In education, one is asked to stand as much as possible outside the body of accumulated knowledge and analyze it. In indoctrination on the other hand, one stands within the body of knowledge and absorbs its teachings. " - Wikipedia
"Fourthly: 'Secular society"-is the worst possible thing,' because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, all of which encourage dissent and rebellion. As Drury sums it up: 'You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty. '"- - Richard Collins (ibid)
"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to do in a perfect way the things their mothers and fathers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, and on the farms." - John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board's "Occasional Letter #1", 1902
And if you still can't beat 'em, join 'em. No. But seriously, if you couldn't keep the hoi polloi from reading, you could still control the "information" on which they might base deliberate thought by buying up the media and controlling what they read by printing just what you wanted them to see. Think William Randolph Hearst. Today five giant media corporations control virtually every bit of "news" and entertainment we're exposed to and are unfortunate enough to think is actual information. Your view of the world and its events is created by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp on FOX, General Electric's NBC, Time/Warner's CNN, Disney's ABC and Sumner Redstone's Viacom, which "regularly checks the iconic CBS news department to make sure Edward R. Murrow is still dead and buried under a mountain of infotainment." - Malcolm Martin " To know the truth is to have power. News is what powerful people don't want you to know. Everything else is just public relations." - Bill Moyers
"Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by an intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses...The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group of leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to it by the leaders...It must be enlightened propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events and the dramatization of important issues." - Edward Bernays, architect of Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information, the Father of Public Relations, and the nephew of Sigmund Freud
"Fifthly: 'Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.' Sixthly: 'In Strauss's view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations." - Richard Collins (ibid)
Input! It's how we function. But we're supposed to be the ones who get to decide what it is that gets put in. And that some of us would choose to use our intelligence to purposefully decide to stifle thought/intelligence in the rest/most of us so they can live their lives being carried around on a satin pillow by living off the "surplus" value of the labor they have appropriated from their "inferiors" is an unpardonable sin.
"Have we learned nothing? Apparently not. No, let me qualify that: Our history has been stripped from us, just like all those trillions. The lessons from the past have been deliberately, serially, erased from our collective memory. And obviously we are not alone in this, for how else do we explain the vast confidence trick that has been played on us by the pirates, who have it seems, sailed away into the sunset with our hard-earned moola and nary a whimper from us as we stand and watch, gobsmacked by the sheer scale of the thievery but unable to do a damn thing about it. ... Trillions stolen and we are left to pick up the tab. But then again, what else is new? ... Yeah, sure we know the world is a complex place and economics, in spite of being the fundamental conditioner of life is for most of us, beyond our ken and kept that way. This explains of course why it's so easy to pull the wool over our eyes. ... Thus it's up to us to try and explain to a world kept ignorant of the very basis of our existence, what in hell is going on." - William Bowles.
We need a LOT of piano tuners!
"Education makes man unfit to be a slave." - Frederick Douglass
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