It occurred to me some time ago that many things are confusing because they are improperly named. For example, the label "Education System" is confusing because it implies that the system in question is primarily about education. Having accepted the premise, you now have many paradoxes to explain.
But if you change the label to, say, "Child Processing Factories", most of the paradoxes disappear.
Edit: I originally wrote "child processing system". But I prefer the stronger formulation.
There is a book called The Addictive Organization that touches on this. Below are a couple thoughts and excerpts cut-and-pasted from my notes:
"What makes the organization addictive is the promise it makes to every employee about the future, which takes them out of the here and now." These promises involve power, money, influence, and social acceptance, the same as the promises of pop culture made-for-TV society.
Having a self-important and grandiose mission statement can make an organization addictive, even if it has little or nothing to do with the actual work being done. "The very fact of having goals can be enough to con employees into believing that everything is all right in the organization."
"One of the ways employees react to this addictive process is by changing their perceptions and thinking, therefore deluding themselves. They try to make themselves believe that the stated mission of the organization is really what is happening, even if what they are seeing and feeling as they work is quite different. When organizations function as the addictive substance, it is in their interest to keep promoting the vision of the mission, because as long as the employees are hooked by it, they are unlikely to turn their awareness to the present discrepancies. They choose to stay numb in order to stay in the organization. The mission is a powerful source of identification for workers. It is a type of philosophical orientation that appeals to their values. Through the mission they find a link between themselves and the organization."
BTW, the sociologists refer to these hidden agendas as the "latent functions" of the organization, in case you ever want to search through the academic papers about this.
It seems we have similar interests. I've run across The Addictive Organization too, in addition to Gatto, though in his case I read Dumbing Us Down, not the book you cited. Gatto seems courageous to me; a real freethinker.
Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?
>Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?
I'm not sure about Durkheim, but I am a big fan of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Not sure about that specific quote, but I know that one of Durkheim's main interests was how organizations, institutions, and culture reproduce themselves, so it would make sense.
I haven't read Dumbing Us Down yet, although I think Underground History was meant to supersede it. I'm sure I'll check it out eventually though.
It starts off with a rather poor summary of the book, but then he eventually makes a few important novel points. He comes up with a list of patterns that separate the nation's elite boarding schools from our public schools. Pretty important stuff, albeit you need to sit through the rest of the video to get at it.
Just popped into my mind: do you know the book "Systemantics" (also known as "The Systems Bible") by John Gall? It's not on education but is very much in the space we're discussing. It's a brilliant (and hilarious) underground classic. I think you would like it. A lot of people here would. It's irreverent and subversive and incredibly smart and not rigid.
One of its more famous aphorisms (relevant to the software startup crowd) is "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked".
The really frustrating bit is sorting out how much of society relies on these fundamentally anti-intellectual structures. That's hard to answer. I really believe that over a certain size, widespread free-thinking is almost an impossibility.
A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.
But if you change the label to, say, "Child Processing Factories", most of the paradoxes disappear.
Edit: I originally wrote "child processing system". But I prefer the stronger formulation.