Education - early acculturation and elimination of effective dissent

"There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself,
the other appreciates what others can understand,
the third understands neither for itself nor through others.
This first is excellent, the second good, and the third useless."
--Niccolò Machiavelli

"Every republic of this sort that we know of since the world began has failed, badly failed
  ... because of the corruption of the people".
-- Benjamin Franklin

A definitive characteristic of the North American educational system is that of ever more demand for accreditation resulting in a continuous pattern of attrition. The higher one goes the more credentials one must attain, as the promise of status, financial success, and social mobility are tied ever more strongly to the number of credentials. Airlines will not hire pilots who lack university degrees (arguably resulting in the best pilots seeking employ elsewhere [7]). Would-be managers must obtain MBAs (usually from diploma mills) in order to find employment (despite no correlation existing between management success and accreditation [8]). Successive waves of candidates must run a qualification gauntlet seeking certificate after certificate in order to guarantee access to economic and social security. The system is designed such that only the most determined, acquiescing, economically able, and the crafty can succeed, as all others drop out along an ever-lengthening way.

All while the value of degrees steadily worsens: “… the once elite high school degrees have become near-universal, common undergraduate training has been supplanted by graduate-level education, and for the lucrative specialities, increasingly by postdoctoral training” [17].

Yet it has been shown repeatedly that “education is often irrelevant to on-the-job productivity, and is sometimes counterproductive” [6,18]. The very grades so prized by students are more or less inconsequential - no correlation has been found to professional performance [19]. Grades serve rather as filters used not for purposes of education but rather for control [20]. For example, “Many of the skills used in managerial and professional positions are learnt on the job, and the lengthy courses of study required by business and professional schools exist in good part to raise the status of the profession and to form the barrier of socialization between practitioners and layman” [16, 21, 22].

Those who resist the political, conformist, and economic pressure of professional associations are ostracised [3,14,17] often before they can even attain certification [4].Combining the winowing aspect of our educational system with its questionable relevance indicates a hypothesis to be explored: that the educational system has a twofold function: (1) To restrict access to work rather than to enable it [15, 23] and (2) To ensure a perpetuation of the pyramid of control and wealth so clearly modelled by current society.

In large part these two functions result is a systemic suppression of creativity, and further have resulted in an educational system largely designed for the promulgation of ignorance in the mask of scholarship.

--This page is an excerpt from the introduction to a paper of mine published in J. Noesis)