We hear, more or less constantly, that schools are failing in their mandate. Nothing could be more wrong. Schools are succeeding all too well, accomplishing precisely their purpose.

What is the primary purpose of school?

To answer this, ask yourself first what society values most. We don't talk about it much, but the truth is that our society values money above all else, in part because it represents power, and in part because, as is also true of power, it gives us the illusion that we can get what we want. But one of those costs of following money is that in order to acquire it, we so often have to give ourselves away to whomever has money to give in return. Bosses, corporations, men with nice cars, women with power suits. Teachers. Not that teachers have money, but in the classroom they have what money elsewhere represents: power.

We live in a culture that is based on the illusion - and schooling is central to the creation and perpetuation of this illusion - that happiness lies outside of us, and specifically in the hands of those who have power.

(...)

Pretend you wish to make a nation of slaves. Or, to put it another way, you wish to procure for your nation's commercial interests a steady supply of workers, and a population pacified enough to not resist the expropriation of their resources.

(...) The primary drawback of each of these approaches (direct force, choice between starvation or wage slavery, force the slaves to pay taxes and enter the cash economy) is that the slaves still know they're enslaved, and the last thing you want is to have to put down a rebellion. Far better for them is to believe they're free, because then if they're unhappy the fault lies not with you but with themselves.

It all starts with the children. If you don't start young enough, you'll never be able to acculturate them sufficiently so that they disbelieve in alternatives. And if they honestly believe in alternatives- those not delineated by you- they may attempt to actualize them. And then, where would you be?

~ Derrick Jensen (walking on water)

God knows the real massacres continue. But the machine gun isn't really what is to be feared most in our civilized Western world. It just isn't needed all that much. The kids leave Miss Jones' class. And they go on to junior high and high school and college. And most of them will never need to be put in an internment camp. Because they're already there. Do you think I'm overstating it? That's what's so frightening: we have the illusion that we're free.

In school we learn to be good little Americans--or Frenchmen--or Russians. We learn how to take the crap that's going to be shoveled on us all our lives. In school the state wraps up people's minds so tight that it can afford to leave their bodies alone.

Repression? You want to see victims of repression? Come look at most of the students at San Diego State College, where I work. They want to be told what to do. They don't know how to be free. They've given their will to this institution just as they'll continue to give their will to the institutions that engulf them in the future.

~Jerry Farber (The Student as A Nigger)

The word education (...) comes from the latin root e-ducere, meaning to "lead forth" or "to draw out". Originally it was a midwife's term meaning "to be present at the birth of". I would contrast that with the root of the word seduce, which is closely related, but with a striking difference. To educe is to lead forth; to seduce is to lead astray.

(...) I wish I had suggested that our departments of education be called, if we were honest, departments of seduction , for that is what they do: lead us away from ourselves.

~ Derrick Jensen (walking on water: reading, writing and revolution)