To think the idea that education is state brainwashing is BS

[Echobelly]

It’s a bit of a bugbear of mine that some people insist that schools serve a function of keeping young people docile and unquestioning. I mean, I was educated a while ago now, but at a state school, and the absolute #1 thing I remember from history was being taught always to question the bias of your sources. Hardly the actions of system dedicated to preventing children from questioning authority. I’m pretty sure kids these days are not being taught ‘Yay! The British Empire was Great’ or ‘The government is fantastic, questioning it is disloyal’, by those notorious right-wingers, teachers.

With DD starting secondary next term, I’d be interested to know if anyone does feel from their own child’s current experience, that schools are somehow attempting to beat them down into dumb subservience? As most of the people I hear espousing the view don’t seem to be those with kids in schools currently.

I guess people also go ‘Oh, but it’s all this “obedience” and following “rules”’ which I think is also kind of bullshit because people actually are intelligent enough to see the difference between rules needed to get along with things like learning, and things in the world that are profound injustices. You can follow the school rules all your educational life and still go on to protest against government abuses of human rights or whatever – it doesn’t mean you get conditioned to accept everything you’re told to think or do.

Don’t get me wrong, too many young people are ill-served by underfunded schools, but lack of critical thinking is probably more to do with distracting media and the rampant self-interest it promotes then schools being some wicked hand of The State.

I think there is a degree of ensuring conformity to certain moral norms and behaviours. Society would break down very quickly if people didn’t have similar expectations in terms of working in paid employment, paying bills, burying the bodies etc.

I don’t think it’s the primary purpose of education. A funded state education exists to elevate our children from feral/scavenging street urchins. It’s a good thing.

I also think it’s my responsibility as a parent to teach my child context: when they ought to be questioning a rule versus doing as they are told.

Did you pick this up from social media groups? When I was using FB there were some groups of what I would call alternative parents. The general gist was - we want to home school because schools produce unquestioning robots. (Hopefully, in the interests of sanity, it will turn DD into one )

These kind of groups tend towards extreme thinking-if you’re not X you must be Y.

Interestingly their children seemed extremely compliant with what the parent wanted the child to be - the child seemed to embody the expectations of the parent so hardly the rebellious free thinker the parent had envisioned.

I think by the time you go to school your personality is quite well formed. Nature plays a bigger role than we like to think. And people tend to copy their parents.

Particularly if one is doing something different to the norm there is a lot at stake in having an end product to show for it all and that your alternative method has “worked”. It would be galling to find out that after all those efforts it was all in the genes!

There is a trend - from America - that’s becoming prevalent in some of the Academy chains for zero tolerance behaviour policies in schools. The most extreme example is the Michaela school in London. No talking in corridors, kids walking on a central painted line, detentions for things like taking too long to get your books out of your bag. Teaching in these schools is also totally focussed on teacher instruction and rote learning. I think there has generally been a swing since the 80s and I can see why parents have issues. I’m a teacher and I’d hate to teach in that kind of environment.

Well, isn't it, in a way. The gov decide what they learn, how they learn and when they attend school.
I think we are just pawns tbh, not meant to think individually

I think over the years schools have leaned towards teaching children what to think, as opposed to how to think.

And a certain amount of education tends to be values-based. Schools can possibly overstep their mandate in that regard. Healthy schools week is a good example. I vividly remember a child reduced to tears in class when, having kept a good diary as instructed, she was told that the pizza she’d eaten on Tuesday evening was a poor choice and she should make a better choice the following week. The poor child had eaten the food her parents provided. And pizza is a perfectly valid meal! As far as I’m concerned, it’s no business of the school’s. A child’s diet is the responsibility of the parents.

I have three children in state secondary schools (and one just finishing the first year of a History degree).

If our mealtime conversations are anything to go by, their school is teaching them critical thinking, how to question the provenance of what they read/hear and how to form a reasoned argument.

IsabellaLinton I have to admit I always used Healthy Schools bullshit Week as an opportunity to teach my children that there are times when telling the whole unvarnished truth might not be the most sensible thing to do.

They've turned out truthful, sensible and able to be diplomatic when needed, so it's worked.

I do believe this to an extent and lots of people of all generations lack critical thinking skills. I think that education on the state level has played a part for years.

In the USA I think education opens up more avenues but makes them more capitalist and money orientated. In the UK its kept at a level that does churn out middle management and lower. It boring and takes no account of artistic and trade and artisan skills. Skills we need more than a basic level of education needed to work in a call centre or if lucky end up a manager or civil servant.

We need mechanics and engineers, scientists and explorers, artists and thinkers, writers and musicians. I don't think state education does this well.

I just don't think governments are organised enough to think 'Ooh, I know, we'll make education insufficient so people will accept bad policies!' They're mostly just lazy.

Let's put it this way; my mum grew up behind the Iron Curtain - they really were told what they should think about things. My MIL grew up in Apartheid South Africa and got in trouble for bringing up that they only ever seemed to hear the winners' side of the story in history. But MIL and Mum grew up to question the status quo despite their educations, so I hardly think the UK's education system is destined to create a land of drones when even countries where education had an outright political goals couldn't do that.

I wouldn't send my kids to school in the UK. I'd home school.

I don't think they teach anything of value to do with real life, just how to sit exams so you can go and work for someone else.

I'd bring my kids up to aim to be self employed/an employer so all the exam and uni box ticking wouldn't mean much. Of course I'd make sure they completed all the stuff necessary to do a degree if they wanted to. But most of what they teach in school is useless.

In school they learn more about life than what the actual lessons are about. How to make friends/lose friends/argue with friends; deal with social hierarchy; learn about authority etc etc etc.

I don't think it's brainwashing but I think there is a huge amount wrong with the traditional schooling system and I am truly dreading the day when I have to put my son through it.

@Pipandmum They can learn all that at home school groups.

I am a secondary teacher and don't believe that education is brainwashing at all, and if the students in my school are anything to go by, they certainly will question things.

School is important, and there are many flaws in the current system, particularly the complete and utter disregard for subjects outside the core or eBacc, but I don't think "brainwashing" is an issue.

I think schools fail by allowing too much personal freedom /free thinking. Yes those are important, but pupils need to learn facts first. You can't be taught to think critically about politics /history /science without first understanding those subjects. Once you have a good grounding (probably at A level or above) you are informed enough to form your own opinions.
Currently we have a population who think the government is the elite and nigel farage is a man of the people. Who don't understand the origins, purpose, and working of the EU (and who are not able to research and find out either). Why is our education system neglecting to teach history and politics? Partly because it's easier to give in and allow pupils to drop these subjects at 14, in favour of more appealing options.

With young primary children it does feel sometimes like you have to inject some detail into the healthy eating message and contradict some of what they've understood/ misunderstood.

No cheese is not a bad food in and of itself type of conversations. Oh and don't worry eating chips once a fortnight is fine! Young children do believe their teachers are infallible ime.

School has a lot of positives for kids too Eliza. Mine have tried group activities and sports plus been in bands and enjoyed trips away with groups that we could not have arranged as home educators.

While I hate the fact that my kids are educated at school to pass tests, their personal interests and (surprisingly) YouTube habits mean that they know a lot about things not on the curriculum.

I would like my kids to get qualifications but the social experiences of school are also very important to me, especially as I have Aspergers and want my kids to connect with people better than I do. I'm not saying that home schooled kids lack social skills - just that school teaches that side better than I could.

I think actually schools do still teach some critical thinking skills- in science, for example, there's a lot about interpreting data and evaluating evidence for and against. The evidence based argument is put forward against things like anti-vaxxing and for climate change- I suppose you could argue that is brainwashing.

I am not sure how much source work they do now in history, but it is not just learning facts or "the british empire was great". There is still a lot of work done on cause and effect, turning points in history and analysing the impact of different decisions and events.

I do think there are things that have happened to the curriculum which is not great- e.g. the removal of books that aren't "British" enough, but I do think critical thinking skills are taught, and it's not a case of brainwashing- have a look at some exam specs for different subjects, and you'll find out what they learn.

I do think there is a lot of teaching to the test, which is a shame, but I really don't think their is brainwashing going on- many teens are educated and informed- you only have to look at the climate strikes to see they are politically aware and critical of power!

It seems desperately to me that extremist 'unschooling' parents do more harm than good. Their feral kids are always building fucking dens in the forest or something as if this is the only real education that's worth anything. It's pretty patronising. Yes, learning facts and things from history might not be scintillating but knowledge needs to be passed on or it will be lost. We can't all go around living like.prehistoric hippies

The brainwashing mainly goes on in PSHE lessons, usually delivered by tutors with little say in what they need to teach and little knowledge and/ or notice of what they are teaching as well. A term on equality, LGBTQI+, soft skills (which really cannot be taught out of context, but frequently are), relationships/ consent, crime and out-of-context British values are not unusual. Not surprising, given the standard response to most of society's ills appears to be 'they need to teach this in schools'.

Other things may look like they have little value individually or due to lack of time in putting things in context (often in over-cramped subjects like the Sciences), but actually teach and require complex skills. It doesn't help that many primary school teachers have little training in complex subjects, little in-depth knowledge of their subjects due to the sheer amount of things they need to teach and that the focus in year 6 is often on Maths and English to the disadvantage of everything else, so basic knowledge often needs to be caught up on in younger years at secondary level.

The complex skills like evaluation and synthesis-based creation are gimmicks at both primary and secondary level; the ability to see the many processes that all link together is not developed enough, and neither is the knowledge base needed to make serious judgements and evaluate impact.

A nation's education system shapes its students. Isn't that painfully obvious? You'd have to be staggeringly naive to think it doesn't. Of course, there are varying degrees of shaping, but surely it's very clear that a state/regime/government wants to churn out a certain kind of person.

Parents are surely more likely to indoctrinate their children than schools.

I think people sometimes confuse 'learning facts' (and some things are facts) with 'killing off imagination' and 'stifling thinking' but to my mind you cannot have creativity and free thought without knowledge.

To the degree I am creative - I do write a bit - it is mostly because of my parents, but also because at schooI and uni l learned a variety of great authors (yes, it could have been a greater variety, but I picked up a greater variety later off my own bat, I wasn't brainwashed into thinking there were no other writers). I couldn't have been just 'taught to be creative'

Similarly, you are unlikely to become innovative with science or technology without knowing the bases on maths and science - knowing them doesn't make you an automata, it gives you the basis to create.

Kids are definitely taught what to think rather than how to think. Dare your child have a view that is not the Liberal norm and you'll have investigation etc cast upon you and risk being labelled as extremist.