Society needs de-schooling!

When we were in school we were taught not to sit or befriend those who were weaker students than us. One of our famous professors would tell us that if we didn’t “study” we would end up being “dukandaars”. There were backbenchers and front seaters. When we could hardly differentiate a right from a wrong we had already been moulded into judging and discriminating between “them and us”, “doctor and dukandaar”, “superior and inferior”, “material prosperity and poverty”, we were initiated on a ‘Capitalist note’ and its profit driven definitions of right and wrong. Capitalism inspired education got us into the habit of measuring things, and of believing that what can’t be measured is either valueless or threatening. The system trained students to conform to an alienated and class-stratified society, a society passive to realities of a social(ist) life.

Capitalist pedagogy reduced student achievement to mere income and employment, with absolutely no role in social justice and inclusion. In fact, it helped in perpetuating of inequality and discrimination and promoted neo-liberal consumerism. The discrimination, the covet capitalist agenda is inculcated through a hidden curriculum that bases itself on principles of external rewards, subservience to the bourgeois norms, and an utmost focus on competition rather than team work.

Kozol wrote in 1975:

“School does not exist to foster ethics and upheaval. It exists to stabilize the status quo. It exists to train a population which is subject to the power of such instruments of mass persuasion as the social order has at hand. It exists to get its citizens prepared for moral compromise. The first and primary goal of the U.S.public school is. not to educate good people but good citizens. It is the function which we call in enemy nations,”state indoctrination.”

All of us need de-schooling now if we want a social change!

(I expect many to disagree because we have been through same process of indoctrination all our lives and we will defend it with those very lives)