Our industrial nation utilized compulsory government schools to train generations of docile, hardworking, obedient, tax-paying employees. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.” The emergence of capitalists as the most influential segment of society enabled them to remake man into a herd animal—a docile, obedient, tamed worker. They are training us to be bored out of our minds.
Our schooling system advances only those who can accept boredom. The ones who can be controlled, regulated, and locked in a classroom enduring tedious instruction from a state-endorsed propagandist are the ones who will succeed. The system requires pupils who tolerate regimented life and recite the “correct” answers to their superiors. The superior then grades them based on their “behavior” (can they accept this form of subjugation or do they “act out”) and their ability to accept and recite back the dogmas they are taught. To advance up the hierarchy they must be willing to accept the doctrine enabling them to eventually become the next generation teaching new recruits. Philosopher Christopher Tollefsen wrote, “Graduate levels of education become a cloning process, whereby the candidate for advancement is taught what communal box he is permitted to think within.”
Long-term education, such as college, weeds out independent thinkers and free spirits and ensures the only ones to excel are conformists who can stay the course. As the education machine weeds out dissidents it leaves a monolithic system with few intellectuals to challenge the status quo.
If the most compliant do not seek to train the next generation, they are still rewarded with places of management coercing production out of the masses. The mobs—those less tolerant of the abuse—have also been trained for the drudgery of hourly labor awaiting them as has been replicated in and learned from their classrooms.
To be degraded to a machine for industrial work, you must, by and large, stop thinking. Educator John Gatto wrote, “During that time, I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids…They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around…And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.” Only 2% of students surveyed said they were not bored at school. Boredom is the number one cause of dropouts.
Free people would not tolerate our modern schooling system or daily industrial work. When the Industrial Revolution occurred, capitalists had a difficult time corralling workers. They were disobedient; they showed up late, left early, would not show up at all, and would not stay on task. But seeing great potential for financial gain, the industrialists allied with the government by utilizing education to train (after the Prussian industrial model) obedience to the state and the factory owners, ensuring they would both benefit. The extent of effort needed to re-educate and continually train people to become tolerant of bosses and to work 9-5 shows how unnatural our system is. Professor Christophe Buffin de Chosal wrote:
“The state…is nothing more than machinery in the operation of the world’s major financial, industrial, and commercial interests…in order that it [society] accepts as good or normal something, it would instinctively reject if it were not conditioned.”
To facilitate our industrial society, we lock kids up in classrooms and force them to endure oppressive boredom. If they do not accept the situation, we drug them for having too much “energy.” Perhaps the kids are not the problem but rather our society’s obsession with boredom. Humans should not be forced to suffer hours of agonizing, repetitive boredom.g For the many parents playing along, it could constitute child abuse. But since “everyone does it,” we accept it. It is “the norm.”
We live in an abnormal society and drug ourselves to adapt to it rather than question if our actions are correct. We hide our abnormalities with Ritalin for kids and coffee and alcohol for parents. The medieval educators aimed to make the experience enjoyable, not a “burden.” They also allowed the individual more freedom to direct themselves towards the subject they enjoyed or excelled at, partly to keep the interest going. Further, they did not force anyone to comply with a governmental education system—at their own expense—forcing parents to pay for their children’s mental and, at times, physical torture, usually at the hands of other students forced into the schools.
The longer the industrialist could keep kids in school, the less they could help the family farm or business, or learn a trade, and the more they would be trained to endure the new industrial economy. Today we provide “self-help” teachers to keep students with no interest in boredom (school), to continue collecting tax dollars by literally refusing to allow them to escape. “No child left behind,” as President George W. Bush said; they all must learn to suffer. None shall be free.
Professor Bryan Caplan argues boredom is essential in our capitalist system. He argues good grades across multiple diverse subjects demonstrate no matter what boredom they are faced with, students will excel and complete the task. Caplan wrote, “Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future.” Further, locking kids in confinement and giving them diverse subjects controlled by the authorities is sure to bore them and kill their spirit and independence, resulting in obedient and productive workers. The modern education system seeks and creates people who willingly obey their employers—advanced degrees “signal” corporations they are appropriately obedient. The other thing boredom accomplishes is to ensure people less capitulating to being a caged animal would have no interest in learning and therefore are no endangerment to the establishment.
Further schooling burns most people out so they won’t seek to gain knowledge outside of approved methods. As some readers may know, my son plays soccer, and some coaches warned me not to have him train too much because it would “burn him out.” And they were right; after just a few years, he got bored doing what he formerly loved to do. Students are forced to do what they do not want to do (schooling) for many more hours than my son played soccer; how can it not burn them out? Perhaps at forty, I enjoy reading and learning today because I did so little in government schools where I was bored to death. I am not as “burned out” as others might be. Further, I am no longer a servant but a master; I control what I learn, and in doing so, I accumulate more knowledge every six months outside of state school than during twelve years in. I bet many homeschooled students retain a greater love of learning late in life because they likely had more freedom and less compulsory learning.
Likewise, democratic societies constantly use distractions—sex, entertainment, medications etc., to keep us from investigating what our politicians are up to. If people are not distracted they might pay more attention to their rulers and educate themselves. Nothing could be more dangerous to rulers than that.
