Why School Breaks Kids' Minds

Joost Meerloo was a psychiatrist who was part of the Dutch resistance against the Nazi's in WW2. His book 'The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing' is very insightful. Chapter 16 deals with education and morale. I'm going to quote heavily from this specific chapter on how it applies to schooling.

Think about this in the context of schools.

"...the enemy counted just as much on friendly gestures and special privileges to seduce the hungry, weakened P.O.W.s into confession. What the inquisitors especially require in order to succeed is that the enemy have a weak personality, that he be a dumbbell with a soldier’s need to conform, that he be ridden with anxiety and lacking in patience."

Do kids in schools often have weak personalities with a need to conform, and are ridden with anxiety and a lack of patience? Yes, so these kids are ripe for brainwashing.

"The child’s formative years are spent under the guidance of first parents and then teachers; jointly they influence his future behaviour. The educational system can either reinforce or correct parental errors and attitudes, either strengthen the child’s desire to grow toward freedom and maturity or stifle his need to develop and twist it into the need to resign himself to permanent childishness and dependence."

Which way do government schools seem to take kids? Toward freedom and maturity, or toward resigning themselves to childishness and dependence?

"Since the Renaissance, the ideal of universal scholastic training has made steady gains. But today we unwittingly tend to mould minds into a prefabricated pattern and to give our students the illusion that they know or have to know all the answers. The fallacy of such half-education is that the so-called alphabetics in contrast to those who cannot read-may become better followers and worse thinkers."

This is the difference between being able to repeat something, and actually being able to think about something. The ability to think about context, alternatives, multiple perspectives and viewpoints, counter arguments, logical sequences, counterfactuals, opposing value assessments, contingencies, etc. Is this the norm in government schools, or are you surprised when you talk to a kid that can actually think?

"The totalitarians, for example, are not against schools; on the contrary, for the more you overburden the mind with facts, the more passive it may become. Intellectual erudition and book-learning alone do not make strong personalities, and in our passion for factual education and the quiz type of examination there lies hidden a form of mental pressure. The awe with which we regard the accumulation of school facts may inhibit the mind so that it cannot think for itself. We must become more aware of the involuntary pressures an educational system can impose on us, and their possibly dangerous effects on the future of our democratic society. The actual strategy of keeping people as permanent students under prolonged supervision is a help to totalitarian indoctrination. For instance, somewhere along the line in some administrative minds, there sprang up the idea that repeated, comparative examinations would increase the quality of the corps of administrators. Instead, infantile anxieties developed related to the fear of this infantile tool of measurement and evaluation: the examination. There is now hardly any administrator who dares to look at reality as the best test of human capacity and human endurance."

This book was published in 1956. This trend has continued since then.

"The form of education which sets a premium on dependency, which over-controls the child, which makes a moral appeal through punishment and provoking a sense of guilt, which overrates mechanical skills and automatic learning, this form of education kneads the brain into a pattern of conformity which can easily be turned into totalitarian channels. This is even more the case in regard to the disciplinary training of soldiers. Such rigid education glorifies good behaviour far too much; imitation and conformity are approved at the expense of spontaneous creativity, thinking for oneself, and the free expression and discussion of dissenting ideas. Our examination mania forces students into mental pathways of automatic thinking. Our intellectual and so-called objective education overrates rationalism and technical know-how under the delusion that this will keep emotional errors under control."

How much spontaneous activity and discussion of dissenting ideas are allowed in government schools? So, are they by definition totalitarian and therefore a good training ground for totalitarian thinking and behaving?

"What it does instead, of course, is to train children into automatic patterns of thinking and acting, which are closer to the pattern of conditioned reflexes, of which Pavlovian students are so fond, than they are to the free, exploratory, creative pattern toward which democratic education should be oriented."

This is useful if you just need people to follow orders and not think. However, even in a military this makes the organization weak and fragile. How much more so a whole society?

"Totalitarianism is well aware that youth has a sensitive period during which Pavlovian conditioning may be established without difficulty. Early teachings form nearly indestructible patterns in the child’s mind and eventually replace innate instinctual precision. This early Pavlovian automatization of life may itself develop almost the force of an innate instinct. Indeed this is precisely what happens in Totalitaria. Dictators especially organize youth and press them to join disciplinary youth movements."

This is why the government likes compulsory schooling in government schools at young ages. It's the best time to program people that won't be able to deprogram themselves later. The communist, socialist, fascist, and so-called democratic and republican societies all agree on this, the kids need to be sent to government schools. Why? For the obvious reasons, the control of the minds of kids.

"In many of our primary schools students are taught in an atmosphere of compulsive regimentation and are imprinted with a sense of dependency and awe of authority which lasts throughout their lives. They never really learn to think for themselves. The scholastic fact-factories, the schools, keep many pupils too busy to think; they may instead educate them into progressive immaturity. As long as people can quote one another and the available “expert” opinion, they are considered well-informed and intellectual. Many schools emphasize what we could call a quotation mania, making the ability to quote the epitome of all wisdom. Yet anyone with an apparently unanswerable logic, anyone who can back up his position with authoritative statements and quotations, can have a strong impact on such a mind, for it can readily be caught and conditioned by emotionally attractive pseudo-intellectual currents. As a matter of fact, in the process of brainwashing the inquisitor makes use of the feeling of confusion his victim gets when he is shown that his facts don’t fit and that there are flaws in his concepts. The man who doesn’t know the tricks of argument will break down sooner."

This is exactly what you see in the general public of the United States and Europe. People only know how to argue from authority. They don't know how to think themselves. That's the universal government schooling methodology. When there are facts that don't fit the narrative they've been taught, they mentally break.

"I like to distinguish among the intellectuals quantellectuals and quintellectuals. The former aim for quantity of knowledge and easily yield to any kind of new conditioning. To the quintellectuals, on the other hand, intellect is a quality of personal integrity. Facts are not consumed passively but are weighed and verified. This kind of intellect has a potentiality independent of school education and often school can spoil it."

Meerloo then gives two examples of smart and yet mentally broken students in schools, and then continues.

"These two cases serve to demonstrate how a mechanized educational system, failing to detect even an urgent need for emotional relationships and a sense of belonging, and placing its emphasis on learning instead of living, can produce adults who are totally unequipped to meet the problems of life, who are themselves only half alive and completely incapable of meeting the challenges of reality. Such men and women do not make good democratic citizens."

This is how good students can be otherwise broken people, and people are confused because they look at the good grades and think everything must be fine.

"One of the most essential tasks of education for mental freedom is to prepare the child for mature adulthood by teaching him to see the essentials and by teaching him to think for himself. There are several fields of interest through which the capacity to think for oneself may be developed-for instance, the field of communication and the science of abstraction. A child’s awareness of his own language, of the words he himself uses, as an expressive tool rather than as a set of grammatical rules can lead him to inquisitiveness about other languages and other ways of thinking, and thus may lead him to the ability to think abstractly and to understand relationships. The child’s period of greatest sensitivity to foreign languages is when he is about ten-much younger than the age at which we normally teach foreign languages. At this age, too, the child begins to have an active personal interest in words and self-expression. This interest can be used to make language an exciting adventurous exploration instead of a cut-and-dried process of memorization."

The reality is teachers have been educated in the government schools as well, and most can't operate on the level of creative abstraction. They don't know how to build from ostensive definition and eliminate specifics to create abstracted conceptions, nor how to communicate this to students. People naturally do it, it may be the primary thing that makes us human, so people do it without realizing it, but without understanding it a teacher would struggle with knowing where to even begin to work on something like that. How would a parent possibly determine if the teacher is doing that, or even capable of doing it? They trust the government to make sure it's happening, and that's not the governments goal.

"Our schools must stimulate inventiveness and self-activity too, through such subjects as carpentry and designing. Creative play with concrete objects also develops the child’s capacity to abstract and to generalize, making it easier for him to absorb the abstractions which underlie all mathematics."

For decades now government schools have been eliminating shop classes. At the young ages the schools that do this best are private Montessori schools, not the government schools.

"If, instead of throwing the child into the sea of abstractions he finds in the daily arithmetic drill, we brought him to an understanding of the process of abstraction by carefully graded steps, he would absorb and assimilate what he learned, not merely parrot what he was told. We tend, for instance, to teach mathematical abstractions at too early an age, just as we wait too long to teach language and verbal expression. History is a subject which is not learned by memorizing facts and dates but through mutual discussion. It has to start with the concept of personal lifetimes and personal history. It is better to give a child a printed report of the history of yesterday and ask for his comments and opinions on it, or better to promote individual thought by letting him search for background information in a library or museum, than to ask him to memorize facts. In this way the learning of history can become an adventure."

Essentially, Meerloo here states that all of the main subject areas are taught incorrectly, and this is true to this day.

"We can also revise the system that risks so easily rearing mediocre people who fit into a pattern of mediocrity. Different children must be trained and educated differently. Each one has his own internal timetable; each one will have his own life adjustments. Why should we compulsively do to our children what we would never do to the flowers in our gardens? Every plant is allowed to attain its own natural size. Our current scholastic practice stimulates ambition in a few children, but stifles it in others. Instead of promoting cheating by our rigid examination rules, why do we not allow children to help one another in the solution of common problems? Very often children can teach each other what the teacher cannot."

Government schools can't make this adjustment, even though sometimes they put out propaganda saying they are, but in reality it's antithetical to their real purpose of standardization and conformity.

"Think for a moment of the child especially sensitive to the boredom of some of our contemporary schools. He becomes either a conformist-full of good marks and no original thoughts-or a rebel-ripe for the child-guidance clinic of today and possibly for the totalitarian state of tomorrow."

Essentially, the kid ends up with no good options.

"Only a self-chosen discipline which develops gradually can lay the basis for inner freedom and morale."

The kid has to be involved in choosing what he's studying. Government schools pretend to adjust for this with limited electives, but it's not real. Limited options with the same structure and government approved curriculum is not true choice.

"We all start by interjecting and taking over our morale from others-our parents and educators. The basis of our personal morale is what we internalized from them. The subtle mutual relation between discipline and freedom starts in the cradle under the care of loving and interested and consistent parents. The parents are the first to build morale. The conflict between discipline and morale in a group usually arises when the members are held together by compulsion or necessity. Here the inner coherence will be completely different from that of a situation in which there is a spontaneous loyalty to the group. The aim of all discipline is to develop a better adjustment to the group. In turn, success in identifying with the group develops a stronger ego. From this point on, freedom begins."

Some kids adjust to the social dynamics of government schools well. Many do not.

"When we want to train a soldier to resist brainwashing, we have to give him antidotes against mass suggestion. We have to teach him to make up his own answers and to criticize his teachers. We must train him in negative suggestibility and emphasize the courage to reject emotionally pleasant reasoning when it does not seem truthful. Above all, we have to repeat such lessons many times to make a self-confident individual out of a recruit. Against the daily barrage of suggestions, we have to provoke individual criticism. All this has to be done in addition to making the soldier familiar with the concept and implications of brainwashing."

A government school couldn't even operate if students were allowed to criticize their teachers repeatedly. So, the kids can't be resistant to brainwashing and be successful in school. It's an either/or situation.

"Morale includes the question of how much people can endure physically and mentally, and for how long."

Kids that participate in sports in school do increase in that one specific domain. Many sports can be pursued outside of school, some can only be pursued in school.

"In psychology we are aware of the fact that there are two sets of determinants which bring on mental breakdown: one set consisting of long-term considerations which cause a gradual breakdown of inner defences, the other consisting of short-term factors, the triggers or provoking factors causing a sudden collapse of the mental and physical integration. To the first set of factors may belong chronic disease or the many chronic irritations of life. The second operates by means of a sudden symbolic impact on hidden sensitivities."

It seems to me that the school environment itself may be a chronic irritation that causes a gradual breakdown of inner defences.

"Yet, trauma and frustration are emphasized too much as weakeners of the personality during its development. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. Challenge and resistance to unfavourable influences make the personality. In order to develop greater inner strength and better ego defences, the individual has to expose and traumatize himself."

Schools have tried to become safe zones where people can't be challenged, which makes the kids weaker and dumber, which makes sense for brainwashing. The developed world in general is nice, and as Meerloo states, "Living under too soft circumstances is probably a weakening factor;".

"Somewhere along the line, good morale means no longer being afraid to die; it means solving that mythological anxiety about death being something dark and obscure; and it means the willingness to accept fate. Accepting fate and duty and responsibility is living in a different way: it is living with the moral courage to stand for moral principles that you have gathered in your life and without which life is not worth living."

How would our government schools even being approaching this subject? They can't. You probably wouldn't want them to anyway considering what they might tell the kids, especially since we've seen that the kids are in a mentally and emotionally weakened state susceptible to brainwashing so they would believe what the government tells them. This is why people send their kids to school for years, not really knowing what's happening, just assuming things are fine because their grades are fine, and then at some point they have a discussion and realize that the kid seems kind of insane and delusional. It's because that's what they've been taught. The parent tries to reason with them, and encounters a lack of arguments because the kid can't think, but they respond with, "I know because my teacher told me! And there are studies and books and things. So I'm right!" It's so ingrained that the parent realizes that the government school now owns the mind of the child and has more influence than the parent, but it's too late to fix. So the parent accepts that they don't really know their own child, and so it happens to generation after generation.

This is why Western Civilization is falling.

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