Member-only story
Search For Meaning
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need society as it is.
— Ivan Illich
*
“How long do you think today’s schools will persist in the educational practices that weigh so heavily upon you? I make no secret of what I think: Their time is past, their days are numbered.
— Nietzsche
*
The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known.
No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth….
Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.
Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life….
…schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of…
