No Accident

At a certain point along the way in starting to become actually awake, aware and discovering who and what you are, it’s typical to begin to wonder just how and why we became a nation (or planet) of Miserable Assholes(tm), and whether it could have actually all happened by accident, or if there was some grand design behind it all.

One of the easy places to grab onto a thread and start pulling on the knot is of course the public education system.  Not that there aren’t a lot of other perfectly deserving targets—public education is just one of the easier ones to begin to understand.

The fact is that America’s public education system was designed and built for a time when a whole lot more factory workers were needed than scholars, philosophers, free-thinkers and other such misfits. 

Back in the day (the day being the mid-to-late 19th century), the frankly stated purpose behind the design of public education was to produce more docile assembly-line workers.  Not a hell of a lot has changed in the intervening 100+ years, either.

I’ve known the broad sweep of this story for awhile now, and had been planning on digging up more and writing a bit about it, but here is an excellent introduction to the topic:

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

A little Google-searching on some of the information presented there will fill in a little more of the back-story for anyone are interested in learning more.

(link via Everything Burns)