While it is often assumed that humans are just naturally violent, the exact opposite seems to be the case. Violence does happen, but as Dr. Brian Ferguson explains in Scientific American, “a close look at archaeological and other evidence suggests that collective killing resulted from cultural conditions.” In other words, warfare is something we are culturally conditioned to believe in and wage, it is not something innate to human nature. The question then becomes if war is not innate in human nature, if humans are more naturally disposed to cooperation instead of waging war with each other, if the acceptance of and participation in the mass slaughter of war is culturally conditioned into us and not simply instinctually a part of us, then where does that cultural conditioning take place? Where does the cultural conditioning that tells us that war is good, noble, true, heroic, etc. take place?
The following article war written by Dan Sanchez, “Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in-chief of FEE.org,” answers that important question. Titled How Schooling Leads to War: From Classrooms to Killing Fields it is about the way that state sponsored education – that is public education ran by the government – conditions the public into obedience and subservience to the government itself for the specific purpose of preparing us to be support of and to take part in its wars. All of the pictures included herein are from the original article. At the end I have included an addendum adding my own thoughts to the arguments that Sanchez makes. The article starts below after the picture of Mr. Sanchez.
****
How Schooling Leads to War
From Classrooms to Killing Fields
In 2013, American and British public opinion said “Hell no” to plans to bomb (and surely regime change) Syria, taking the momentum out of the march to war. This marked a peak in post-Iraq war-weariness. But then in August 2014, many hearts were touched by the plight of a group of Yazidis trapped on a mountain and besieged by ISIS. So public opinion sanctioned a humanitarian military rescue. During the operation, it was revealed that the crisis was blown way out of proportion, as excuses for war so often are.
Predictably, ISIS retaliated. The group posted snuff films depicting the beheading of western journalists. American outrage was intense enough to allow President Obama to essentially launch a new war on ISIS. And since ISIS was in Syria as well as Iraq, this provided cover for American planes to enter and bomb Syria after all. This too elicited retaliation, in the form of ISIS terror attacks against civilians on western soil: in France, the U.S., Belgium, and elsewhere.
Following these attacks, western war weariness was eclipsed by a resurgent militant hostility toward Muslim peoples. Now America is in a fighting mood, and may be one major attack away from tipping headlong into war fever again. And all it took was less than two years of escalating tit-for-tat hostilities between western militaries and ISIS, starting with the Yazidi rescue, for public sentiment to revert from “hell no” to “let’s roll.” The American war machine is primed and “Ready for Hillary” or Trump.
How did we become so manipulable and herd-like? So easily spooked into hysterical stampedes? So docile and ready to be driven by our government herders over the precipice of war?
In a word, near-universal compulsory schooling. In school, students are not so much taught as they are conditioned. Schooling deeply ingrains certain mentalities that foster militancy: timidity and tribalism, dependency and docility, conformity and credulity. And so schools sow the spiritual seeds of war.
Only a people conditioned from childhood to be easily terrorized will react to small-scale crimes with mass panic. Only a people afflicted with rank tribalism will respond to the murder of a few dozen westerners by a handful of Islamists by sanctioning mass military violence against Muslim populations. Only a people beset with learned helplessness would respond to perceived threats by reflexively offering total deference to the authorities: yielding their freedoms and totally outsourcing the responsiblity to protect themselves and their families. Only a people trained to unquestioningly trust the ordained experts would let themselves be lied into war time and again.
The dependency and docility are cultivated by placing children under constant direction and supervision by teachers and administrators, who bestow favors and inflict punishments at will. Then there is the regimentation: the prescribed classroom routines, constantly being lined up, the P.E. exercises in military drill formation, the assigned movements from cell to cell according to a Pavlovian bell. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ritual of professing submission to the State, originally prescribed it to be accompanied by what he termed “a military salute”: the same salute now famously associated with the Nazis.
All this conditioning is reinforced by the content of the curriculum, which emphasizes reverence for authority: from its glorification of the police to its cult of the presidency.
The factory schools mass-produce lockstep “patriots,” ready to fall in line in support of whatever war his government has declared, and to hate whichever foreigners his government has instructed him to hate. They also churn out “good soldiers” ready to enlist or be conscripted, and then to lay down their lives if so commanded: the ultimate “pledge of allegience” to the State.
In fact, universal compulsory schooling was invented specifically for this purpose. As John Taylor Gatto wrote in his Underground History of American Education:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena.
…The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the “Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte — one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all.”
In school, the teachers, textbooks, and answer keys are dispensers of the “right answers.” This is the prime source of our propensity to gullibly swallow the false narratives and outright fabrications fed them by the “experts” in government and the media to sell each war.
Then there are the emergency drills. The fire drills are still with us. The nuclear terror of duck-and-cover drills have been replaced by the updated terror of active shooter drills. These do nothing to enhance safety. The drills only drill into the developing brains of children trauma, terror, and timidity. They train the public to automatically defer to authority and yield to regimentation and mobilization whenever a perceived threat emerges.
Schools also help to seed the tribal nationalism that is so crucial for war. Pep rallies serve as preparatory play-acting for later participation in war rallies. The kind of sentiments first stimulated as “school spirit” and “team spirit” are later rekindled as militant patriotism. In between wars, and after graduation, the attitude of tribal chauvinism simmers as team sports fandom, ready to be boil over into militant jingoism as soon as a foreign country is designated as a “rival team.”
This too is reinforced by the curriculum, which is suffused by nationalistic myths about past wars. In American schools, the lessons most emphasized revolve around World War II. Largely based on the official narrative of “the good war,” we are indoctrinated from childhood to accept our government’s heroic and indispensible role in the world; the folly of appeasing past and future Hitlers; and the hard but often “necessary” choice to bomb, even nuke, foreign civilians for the greater good.
Schools are hatcheries of the herd-minded, and nurseries of war.
Addendum
I think that Sanchez’s arguments are far stronger than even he realizes. Horace Mann, the father of public -state controlled education in the United States explained the purpose of education in state ran schools clearly:
Above all others, must the children of a republic be fitted for society as well as for themselves. …In a government like ours, each individual must think of the welfare of the State, as well as of the welfare of his own family, and, therefore, of the children of others as well as his own. It becomes, then, a momentous question, whether the children in our schools are educated in reference to themselves and their private interests only, or with a regard to the great social duties and prerogatives that await them in after-life.
Life and Works of Horace Mann, pg. 422
Public schools are designed to train people to think that believing in and demanding that their own rights and needs be respected is inherently selfish and evil and that the “welfare of the State” must be considered the most important thing above all else. Just think of how many people who think it no sin to extort from the public their wealth through taxes and labels as selfish anyone who doesn’t want to be robbed when logic would dictate that those who are demanding the wealth and labor of others under threat of violence or force are the selfish ones. Just think of how many people have no problem pledging their allegiance in a military salute, obedience, subservience, and lives (remember the hand goes over the heart the symbolic seat of love and live for a reason) to those in power or who, “for the good of the country,” will go fight in wars where they will invade, occupy, and destroy other nations and help murder hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Why would people perpetuate these insanities? Because, they have been “educated” in public schools to place the “welfare of the State” above all other concepts such as individual liberty, peace, morality, and peace. Most of us have been indoctrinated into what Dr. Carl Jung called “mass mindedness” without even realizing it.
It is no accident that Mann’s model for the American public school system was the education system of Prussia (ibid. pgs. 85, 240-241) as it had one of the most well developed and well organized school systems in the West and the fact that Prussia was one of the most militaristic and authoritarian nations in the world. (See War and the Rise of the State by Dr. Bruce Porter, pg. 116) Public education introduces children to regimentation from childhood, teaching them to obey on command without question, to salute and pledge their lives and wealth to the government, indoctrinates them in the myths of history and the ideologies that justify the rule of those in power, portrays the government they rule through as heroic and benevolent, and teaches students the hymns and rituals of the State that are designed to generate within them powerful feelings of love, loyalty, and faith to the government. Notice this isn’t about just exposing children to soldiers nor treating children as if they were soldiers. It isn’t anything that obvious. It is about how public schools condition us to believe as facts the very things which keep it in power. This is not coincidence. Public schools are the churches of the State and are the primary means by which we are indoctrinated into the Cult of the State And the purposes of government invariably lead to war.
As Latter-day Saints we follow the Prince of Peace, a God who has commanded us to never kill another person and to completely renounce and forsake all war. As people religious or not who are dedicated to the ideals of liberty, equality, prosperity, and peace we must be aware of the impact of public schools and how they manipulate and condition us for obedience to the State so that it can use our resources, wealth, and lives for its ultimate cause – the maintaining and expansion of state power through police force at home and through military force, war, abroad. Knowing these truths we must then reject the means by which we are culturally indoctrinated into these beliefs and the organization which is doing this to us – the state ran public schools and the governments which control them.
