"Training Camps" for the Oppressed

I dropped out of high school but went on to perform very well in city college and in a four year university. Why was this the case? In college, one can choose his or her own field of study and that provides a little more motivation to show up every morning but there is more. Our public elementary, middle, and high schools (public universities function differently so I will exclude them in this) serve other purposes beyond education. They claim to prepare children and teens for adulthood but they seem to be trying to produce a very specific kind of adult and that was not what I wanted to be. I realized that schools exist as one of the many hands of the established system of authority and their purpose seems to be to guide (or shove) the youth down a path of willing subjugation and acceptance of the authority.

In my sixth grade year, I was required to take a class titled "Life Skills" and, at the time, it seemed innocent enough but in retrospect, it might as well have been called "Propaganda Dumpster-fire" or "the Misinformation Hour." This class was forced on all students and it was, quite literally, an hour of our day that was dedicated to teaching us to obey the established authority and delivering its propaganda to us under the guise of imparting important life lessons. We were told that the police are our noble protectors (and not brutal oppressors) whom we should call when we see even the slightest transgression against our "just" laws because "a society needs order" and, apparently, the only day to achieve that is through the murder of nonviolent suspects and the theft of rightfully owned property. They made us produce our own propaganda for fuck's sake. We were required to draw and color an anti-marijuana poster that featured some of the scary "facts" (bullshit would be more accurate but they called them "facts") about the "dangers" of the drug. However, the most insidious lesson that we were given was that only through the obedient completion of our public "education" would we find success in our futures.

Kids are routinely asked to "spy" on their parents for the government which teaches them that they should choose the authority over all else and (more disturbingly) puts them in real danger. I experienced this rather wrong bit of advice on several occasions. Every time we were given some anti-drug lecture, we were encouraged to report any of our parents' drug related activities because their "substance-abuse" puts us in danger. The dark irony in that request is that the students who are foolish enough to obey (usually very young children, in these cases) are often removed from their homes and placed with strangers where they face far more serious dangers than accidentally inhaling some of daddy's weed smoke. Being asked to side with some cop and my douche-bag of a P. E. coach left a bad taste in my mouth when I was a student but, as an adult, I find the fact that the authority actually actively recruits nine year old's as "drug informants" (often to the kids' own determent) to be utterly sickening.

I decided to stop going to high school when I was told that standing up for myself and speaking my mind were grounds for rather severe punishment but that is one of the primary authoritarian messages that is pushed in the public education system. I came to fully understand what the purpose of public school was after I was hauled into my principal's office for "being disruptive." I was assigned some make-up work a few days earlier which I completed and turned in. That morning, the teacher told me that I was still missing those assignments. I told her that I had turned them in but she refused to believe me. I stood up for myself and when she barked "well, they're not here," as she angrily shuffled some papers around on her desk, I responded by asking if she was "calling me a lair" and was promptly thrown out of the class. I asked myself; "what is the purpose of teaching us that 'bending over and taking it' is the right thing to do?" Then I realized what I know now. The schools serve the authority and the authority thrives when its subjects are conditioned to "bend over and take it."

I have written about how schools function as "training camps" for the oppressed in the past but I believe that this is an important issue to be aware of and to speak out against. The schools scare a lot of young people into compliance because they tell them that their futures are riding on some worthless gym class. "If you drop out, you'll end up blowing truckers for half of a gas station sandwich because you can't find a 'good job,'" they say and a lot of kids believe them. Many choose to bow to the the authority and go on to be submissive, easily exploited adults. That is a problem that I think is worth revisiting now and again in the future.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.