“Wrong Education,” Adano Ley Grunted

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Adano Ley (Swami Nitty-Gritty) helped me sew my class uniform at the Texas Institute of Reflex Sciences.

I was delighted when he ran out of thread due to my aversion to anything requiring mechanical dexterity.

“Adano,” I asked, “Why would someone, specifically myself, have such a resistance to machinery?”

“Wrong education,” he grunted.

Adano went to school for a single day.

I don’t want to go to school. They can’t teach me what I want to know,” he told Benjamin, his father.

“Then go to work and earn your keep,” Benjamin said.

Adano apprenticed to a local tailor.

Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 1973) wrote …

“The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but they do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.”

Richard Stivers (Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational, 1999) wrote …

“The United States is the only developed nation in the world that does not mandate media literacy as part of its public-school curriculum. There are reasons why. Media literacy is dangerous — not to the individuals who gain it, but to the people and institutions that depend on our not having it. Once we master the tools of media literacy, we cannot apply them selectively. If we learn the techniques that an advertiser uses to fool us, we have also learned the techniques that a government uses. If we demystify the role of our high-tech pundits, we may demystify the role of our priests as well.”

Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971) wrote …

“The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so”

According to the same source …

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.”

This quote is from a book published 45 years ago, and the situation is much worse today.

We need to find a warehouse filled with crates of those see-through-the-Maya sunglasses John Nada used in the John Carpenter movie, They Live.
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