Why is the world the way it is? With all of the sh*t that’s going on these days, it seems like a great time to be asking that question more than ever.
You can generally have one of two viewpoints about this. Either the world is “out there” and something separate from you…something you’re not really responsible for, just something you have to deal with.
Or the world is a manifestation of what’s “inside” and actually a collective co-creation of every human on this plane. This view makes it something for which we all hold responsibility.
There’s not a lot of power in taking the first viewpoint, where the world basically HAPPENS to you. It’s a sucky perspective to have because it leads to a life lived in response to a creation that is seemingly beyond your ability to control.
The second viewpoint, where we’re all contributing to the world we see, is a far more powerful perspective. Because once you view the world through that lens, you can start asking valuable questions.
Questions like…
- What are the forces or inputs contributing to the world we see?
- Which ones are productive?
- Which ones should be changed?
- Which ones should be destroyed?
The Autonomy of the Mind and the Future of the World
From my perspective, there is little that’s more important than autonomy of mind. The mind focuses the creative capacity of each living being.
It is the source of much of our experience. So if the mind is not free, the body cannot be free, the spirit cannot be free and ultimately, the world cannot be free.
This is what makes the development of young minds so important. If you can control that part of humanity, you can eventually control it all.
That’s pretty much where we’re at today. It’s not a pretty picture.
The issue with the mind is that it seems to lack the ability to see beyond its own boundaries. Whether those boundaries are natural or completely engineered doesn’t really matter.
So is autonomy of the mind natural or is it a learned behavior? As best I can tell with my minuscule sample size of my own 10 children, children come into the world with no limits on their understanding of what is possible.
Even more than that, they come with the ability to perceive other dimensions of reality that most adults are indoctrinated to believe do not exist. Once that belief changes, their sight aligns with that belief.
“Make believe” is the term we use to make it clear to children that there is a “real” world. The world of the Matrix that the slaves inhabit. And that there is a “make believe” world children can inhabit only until they are ready to grow up into real slaves.
The limits of their reality are taught to them, reinforced over and over by rote, until they either accept them or rebel against them.
The Systematic Installation of the Invisible Control Structure
If you are going to control a population, you need predictability. You need to know how they think, how they feel, how they will respond to various external and internal stimuli.
Once you have “mapped” the masses like this, and have some sense of security that their responses will fall within an acceptable range of predictability, then you can push forward with your plans for control.
And that brings me to an important man named John Taylor Gatto. He was named the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Gatto is largely responsible for unveiling the greater conspiracy of “schooling.”
Some minds are so well trained they think the idea of a worldwide conspiracy to pretty much dominate all of humanity is preposterous. My hunch is that folks who think this way have been “educated” in a manner that makes conceiving such things as far beyond the realm of “reasonable.”
Hopefully in the future, we will stop raising children in a way where they end up as adults with such limited ability to think.
On receipt of his award back in ‘91, Gatto took the opportunity to explain to the world the real lessons he had been teaching his students. I imagine the people that were there were quite surprised to hear what these lessons were. I’ll list them here quickly.
According to Gatto, what kids are really taught in the school system is:
- CONFUSION (Everything is taught out of context, in no particular order, with no connections from one thing to another. Children are taught disconnected facts, not MEANING.)
- CLASS POSITION
- INDIFFERENCE (Nothing is THAT important. Once the bell rings, you move on.)
- EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY (Grading)
- INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY (Children are trained to wait for the teacher to tell them what to do and what to learn.)
- CONDITIONAL SELF-ESTEEM (Your self-respect should be based on an expert opinion.)
- YOU CAN’T HIDE (You are being watched. All the time.)
The end result is that you have human beings systematically disconnected from their own internal authority.
And that leads to a world where people are running a program that makes them seek out the authority for them, instead of running a program that makes THEM their own authority.
This from another Gatto article:
School was intended, on this continent, to be as it had been in northern Germany, a fifth column into the burgeoning libertarian condition where disenfranchised and oppressed groups were clamoring for some kind of seat at the bargaining table.
School was to be a surgical incision into which the class-based management theories of England were to be inserted to interdict the liberty traditions. England’s multi-layered social class is simply a modern day representation of Julius Caesar’s advice that when you are overwhelmed by the enemy you divide them and conquer them that way by setting them against each other.
The method was to be by infiltration into the minds of children out of sight of their parents. The well-read here won’t be shocked. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to Frederick of Prussia knew and taught explicitly that if children could be kept childish beyond its term in nature, if they could be cloistered in a society of children without any real responsibility except obedience, if their inner lives could be attenuated by removing the insights of history, literature, philosophy, economics, religion, if the imminence of death and the certainty of pain and loss could be removed from daily consciousness, if the profound reflections on one’s own death could be replaced by the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy and fear, young people would grow older, but they would never grow up, and a great enduring problem of supervision would be solved, for who can argue against the truth that childish and childlike people are much easier to manage than critically trained, self-reliant, ones.
If schooling has such a nefarious purpose, then what is actually being taught to the kids 8+ hours per day? We could ask Mr. Gatto, but as it turns out, he went looking forward the answer to this question too.
So let’s not take Mr. Gatto’s word for it here. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was angry. Maybe he had a vendetta against the school system. Who knows?
Let’s get a second opinion. This time, we’ll go right to the source. We’ll go to one of the esteemed experts responsible for the creation of schooling in this country.
And wouldn’t you know it, we find an answer from the very lips of one Alexander Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named. This is a guy who was instrumental in the development of “education” in this country.
Here’s a quote from Gatto’s 2003 article in Harper’s Magazine where he explains what is actually taught in the school system, as outlined by Inglis. I’ve bolded and highlighted some sections to make sure you don’t miss them.
The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That’s a pretty disgusting list of lessons. If you actually have kids, that should make you feel like puking. Is THAT what you want for your children?
Since almost everyone reading this has gone to school, it’s not hard to connect some of these lessons with your own experiences. I learned all of these lessons pretty well, and I went to a “great” collection of private schools. I can’t imagine what it’s like in some of the public schools these days.
What I’ve Discovered Watching 10 Kids Growing Up
I’m no education expert. But based on what I’ve seen, what makes kids light up is far LESS about teaching them and far MORE about creating and allowing space for them to discover how to teach themselves.
Children thrive with LARGE AMOUNTS OF UNSTRUCTURED time. So do adults. And if society hadn’t been trained to fixate on “getting things done,” and could fill its days with large amounts of unstructured time, the inherent creativity of humanity would be obvious to everyone once again.
I know this NOW. I did not realize this 15 years ago. But I was taught this lesson by seeing how my daughter, Talula, responded to full days in a Waldorf type school.
(For the first few kids, back when we were less confident about how we wanted to shepherd them through childhood, we gave them the option of attending a Waldorf type school for a little to see how it fit.)
My son quit Waldorf very early on after he asked to paint with purple one day and was told that only primary colors were allowed. For him, that amount of arbitrary constraint was not something he was interested in.
Talula also decided to give school a try.
School is a land of constant stimulation. So when she would return home at the end of the day and find that stimulation missing, she’d basically go through a type of emotional withdraw that would end up creating frustration, anger or tears or something along those lines.
It was not a pleasant experience for her, nor was it pleasant for us.
Having been away from us all day, she’d also try to “catch up” on her desire to have time with each of us. The end of the day in our house is an unpredictable period. Some of the kids might be having a breakdown, others might be in the middle of a nap, still others might be on their 15th request about when dinner is happening. So it’s not the best time for one-on-one attention to be provided on a consistent basis.
After a few weeks of this routine, where the flow of the family and the kids were constantly disrupted by an arbitrary schedule, and when Talula got tired of missing so much of life with the family, she stopped and never went back.
School has a rhythm. But so do children. And since I’ve been able to witness their natural rhythm (each one is different), I can see just how disruptive a school type schedule is for that.
In Life, “Behind” Doesn’t Exist
Technically, I guess the “experts” would say my son is “behind” on his reading. He didn’t teach himself to read until he was nine. That’s when the pain of NOT reading became greater to him than the challenge of learning to read.
So he asked to learn to read and he did it.
In the school system, he’d surely have been labelled as “behind.” Behind what I’m not sure, but telling that to a child is a stupid thing to do if you care about them. Especially because, in real life, there is no such concept.
Only in the artificial world of schooling are some kids ahead, while others are behind.
In real life, there’s no place for you to be OTHER than the place where you are. And training a child to feel that’s NOT the right place for them co-opts the creative capacity they have to generate their own path in life.
When you learn more about the development of children, however, you begin to see that the way school is setup is not ONLY not optimal but actually designed to HURT CHILDREN.
Reading is a great example.
What do I know about this? I know that a child, up until about the age of 7-9, exists in a type of meditative state, with his brainwaves in the alpha range. That’s akin to light meditation.
This is the reason that imaginary stuff comes so easily to kids. It’s because their brain is in a state where it is easy to perceive that dimension of reality.
But when a kid goes to school, they start learning to read right away. Anywhere from 4-7 is “normal.”
So what happens when you have a kid who is naturally in an alpha brainwave state and you force them, by rote, to move into their conscious mind to “work” on learning to read?
You mess up their normal development, that’s what happens.
Isn’t This Overreacting?
Maybe I should just calm down and realize that life isn’t going to be perfect? Perhaps I should just filter a few of my thoughts and smooth out some of the rough edges so as not to be so abrasive in my opinions about schooling?
I think it’s too late for me to be able to do that.
Because the idea of offering up to a relative stranger, not to mention an entire institution, the responsibility of educating your own child, seems like a crazy thing to do.
We have a lot of reasons that we’re supposed to think this is normal, of course. I believed most of them for a very long time.
- I’m not cut out to teach my child. What do I know? I’m no education expert.
- I don’t have the time to do this.
- That would never fit into my lifestyle.
- I don’t want to make my child feel weird, like he is different.
- How will he get into college?
- (And the best one of all:) How will he learn to “socialize?”
The Matrix is seductive in its convenience. I’ll give it that. Certainly it’s just easier to send your kid to school and then get back to your life. That’s how I used to think. That’s the goal I used to pursue. A neat and tidy life where everything is in its box, calm, orderly and organized.
But that’s not real life. That’s the mind trying to control life.
Remembering Through the Mind Prison
The challenge with the journey towards autonomy is that, if you’ve had the “normal” experience growing up, then most likely, your mind was programmed to think and perceive in a way that does not ultimately serve you.
That’s why things like “school” seem like the normal thing to do. That’s why you most likely have barriers installed that keep you from doing or saying certain things. That’s why there’s a good chance that you are living parts of your life CONTRARY to what you really want to do.
I was a straight A student, the valedictorian of my class. So I’m well acquainted with this training. I spent my life following all of the rules!
With the mind’s inability to see beyond its boundaries, whatever those are, how are you supposed to retrain your mind so that the fake boundaries no longer exist?
Step one is to become more aware of the connection between what you think and feel and what you do.
- Are your actions truly in alignment with the knowledge of your heart? Or are your actions responding to the incessant commentary your brain is supplying about what others might think or do because of your actions?
- How many things do you KNOW are true? So true that you have suspended all critical thought about those things? That’s often a place the programs hide. In a spot you would never think to look because you “know” the things in that spot are true.
- Do you have a feeling in your core that you’re not yet living your best life but it feels like you can’t get out of your own way to start truly living?
Meditation is one route to restoring the connection between the real you and your experience in the world. It is simply the practice of getting your mind out of the way and experiencing what remains.
The more you practice, the louder the signal that is really YOU becomes in your life.
Eventually, the dissonance between your mind chatter and your internal truth becomes so great you’ll have to choose which to follow. Over time, you’ll make that choice many times until you reorient your relationship with your mind.
No longer will you be stuck IN the movie, unable to perceive it is going on. Instead, you’ll be observing the movie, with full awareness that you are sitting in the theater and watching the drama play out on the screen.
In addition to meditation and its opportunity to tune out the noise and reconnect with yourself, you can also search out ideas that run contrary to your own and develop a practice of critically assessing what has merit and what does not.
Unlike what school trains people to think, that is a determination only YOU can make for yourself.
The hardest part of retraining your mind really has nothing to do with your thoughts but how your thoughts affect your feelings.
- That feeling you get if you leave your house without that piece of plastic that makes it “OK” to drive a car down the road.
- Or that feeling you get when you get a letter from the IRS.
- Or that feeling you get when you think about what might happen if you don’t “follow the rules.”
No human is born this way. We are engineered to be this way. And that engineering happens on a mental AND emotional level.
Ultimately, the Choice is Yours
This is really the lesson of life: you are responsible for you. You make your own choices. You live with the consequences.
You are far more powerful than the system would like you to know.
You are far more capable than the system dare let you find out.
And if you went through the school system, you most likely are performing at a fraction of the capacity you have to succeed on this plane.
You can’t change where you’re at today. But you can change where you’re going tomorrow.
The difference between living the life of a programmed mind slave and living the life of a free being is simply a CHOICE.
You don’t have to know how to do it at the beginning. You just have to want to take the journey.
The path will unfold from there…
