What Did You Learn in School Today?

What Did You Learn in School Today?

By Max Kantar

Having been subjected to a dozen years of schooling in preparation for adult life and the university, and having now been nearly five years removed from the setting, I should think that I am in good standing to reasonably evaluate my general experience. Without wanting to slight the kind and genuine teachers—a relatively small bunch, I‘m afraid—who have enriched my life and the lives of others, I will nevertheless stick to the more general experience of secondary schooling, rather than rare, unrepresentative exceptions to the rule.

The problem with school wasn’t so much a problem of individuals, but a problem of institutions. The broader institutional structures of the school system served to prepare us for a life of painful employment, perpetual ignorance, and mindless consumerism. We quickly learned—at least the good students did—to perform on command utterly pointless tasks with reflexive thoughtlessness. We were made to understand the importance of subordinating everything to time constraints erected without our consent. A dozen years of sitting still at desks—under the threat of punishment—in monotonous classrooms taught us that unhappiness, triviality, purposelessness, and surrendering one’s free will is not only an intrinsic part of enlightened and privileged existence, but an inescapable fact of life. (This couldn’t possibly have anything to do with why so many young people appear apathetic and superficial, right?) We unwittingly came to accept the view that authority is self-justifying and challenges to it can only exist within the rigid constraints that it firmly establishes. We certainly were not allowed to forget that the only alternative to American-style culture and civilization was a Third World dictatorship. Responsible people vote, we were told, and that, along with occasionally writing letters to your congressman, is the essence of democracy and hundreds of thousands of years of human development.
Predictably, like millions of other helpless children, I grew up believing that Christopher Columbus was simply a great navigator, likely a decent person, certainly not some savage, racist, torturer and mass murderer. Similarly, George Washington was not a slave-owning, genocidal maniac; he was a simple, modest man, who with his genius and love for humanity gave birth to freedom and democracy. Had we learned that the primary authors of the Constitution felt that “those who own the country ought to govern it” and that the role of the government in a liberal democracy should be to “protect the opulent minority from the majority,” perhaps the citizenry might be inclined to question the benevolence and intentions—that is, think rationally—of those holding power today.
We never discussed history in a relevant context or serious way, dealing with concepts, trends and principles rather than selective, useless and minute facts, embarrassingly vulgar clichés, and hero worship. No teacher ever explained capitalism or even thought it worthy of discussing. I would later come to learn that wage labor—another unmentionable concept—was strongly resisted for many decades by the American public, most of whom bitterly denounced it as ‘wage slavery’, an intolerable condition fundamentally similar to chattel slavery. I literally never heard the word “solidarity” once in school—a matter of some significance considering that solidarity was the major theme in American working class culture for many decades during the labor movement.

Not only did the school system fail to provide us with the means of intellectual self-defense necessary to combat the lies and deceit peddled nonstop by the dominant media and intellectual culture, it actually operated within the same misleading and destructive framework of assumptions, regurgitating official doctrine and constantly reinforcing conventional, power-serving world views.
So when the U.S. military invaded Iraq during my sophomore year of high school, did anyone think to even mildly question the right of our government to carry out, literally, by the standard of the Nuremberg Tribunals, the Supreme International Crime? Well over one million Iraqis have since been killed as a direct result of the U.S. aggression. How many more millions have suffered tremendously? Are our schoolhouses not soaked with the blood of Iraqi children who have been denied the right to attend school, or for that matter, the right to attend life, as a result of our government’s actions made possible in large part because of the complicity of the schools and their near universal failures to teach children the truth?
To be fair, I am sure that a few teachers may have opposed such a heinous and criminal act of mass murder and violence, but likely this (definite) minority felt immensely constrained by institutional and administrative controls, which are quite real, and could potentially cost someone their job. But how can an honest pupil respect or admire a teacher who is either too ignorant or too cowardly to speak out or act out against such grave and naked injustice? And what good are freedom and the first amendment if they are not applicable in a house of education, of all places?
At any rate, most teachers and all administrators were more concerned with disciplining students who skipped out on the shameless, daily barrage of corporate commercial propaganda, celebrity gossip, and wanton state worship provided by Channel One News. Naturally, such practices coincided well with the ever-presence of military recruiters in school and the free reign given to them to lure young boys and girls into fighting wars we were actively prevented from understanding.
Indeed, such conventions reflected some of the highest values of school authorities. I vividly recall our since-retired assistant principle who, while sitting in for an absent history teacher, lectured the otherwise defenseless class on the virtues of torture as a means of both extracting information and doing justice.

As it is, I can’t recall one bit of good sense bestowed upon me by either school administrators or teachers alike in all my years of secondary education. Indeed, it is all I can manage today to try and undo the many years of intellectual and moral oppression brought upon me by years of conditioning and subordination in the school system.