The Curricula of Empire: Institutions to Control Truth

Let's start with why I am not a big fan of schooling. I think that by default, school does a lot of harm.

Worst on the list is that school teaches you that there is an official idea of what is right and wrong. And you are taught that once you have internalised this idea of right and wrong, you know for sure what is right and wrong.

This is what makes people of my generation here in Australia so readily and easily disgusted at President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, as a supposed war criminal for responding to Western and Ukrainian aggression in the Donbass in Russia's immediate vicinity, while not blinking an eye at the mention of former prime minister John Howard, who led Australia to invade Afghanistan and Iraq completely unprovoked on the other side of the world, or for that matter, Robert Menzies who led Australia to the unprovoked invasion of Viet Nam, again on the other side of the world.

I cannot stand the Aussies so ridiculously waving their flag at the Australian tennis open while demanding that Russian players, two of whom are amongst the top 5 men's seeds (Daniil Medvedev and Andrei Rublev), have to wear no flag, like their country doesn't exist. You are talking about Australia, for goodness' sake, a country founded upon the most brutal of invasions. If ever there were countries that didn't deserve to exist in international contexts for hideously cruel occupation and invasion, for the most grotesque violations of human life and decency, the United States, Canada, Australia and Israel would top that list. Their existence has no legitimacy but that based on generations upon generations of inflicting violence.

They rattle off Russia as some kind of dictatorship. Look at the U.S.! President Joseph R. Biden and the Democrats are trying to litigate the hell out of former president Donald J. Trump to stop him from being able to run for office. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is so screwed over by the Democrats' machinations, as was Bernie Sanders before him, that he can't even run in that party anymore – he's running as an independent.

It's not just these surface-level things, but it does touch on some of the fundamental functions in society that school fulfils, as well as other institutions for manipulating truths like news outlets.

School, in its primary capacity as an institution, conditions you to accept the mainstream word and reject anything outside of it. This is one of the main things that makes dissident journalism super hard, as well as anything else that falls into invalid career paths within empires. It is a particularly crucial element for control. Each subsequent generation misses out on the dissent of the current generation primarily because of schooling. The empire has filtered them out.

Once I met a Marxist on the train (he had a tote bag from a Marxist conference and was involved with Victorian Socialists) and he pointed out that Marxism is one of the most important things out there in the world of the last century, but it doesn't get taught in schools here. Anti-colonial revolutions and Marxist revolutions have freed entire peoples — of course it isn't mentioned in schools within imperial borders.

School indoctrinates you to the blandest of prides: institutionalist and nationalist pride.

I wrote this as a response to Why is Unschooling so fringe? by Idzie Desmarais. Unschooling is where the child or person chooses what and how they want to learn, and when and where – but most simply put, it is no different to living life itself.

Unschooling is fringe because we are conditioned to accept success in a certain form — whether it's a prestigious well-paying job or making money out of your hobby, because work can be very unrewarding, very demanding, and very low-paying. So for example, a repeated story or formula for success is that every hobby that you love and get good at is to be turned into a potential source of income — sometimes, if not oftentimes, robbing you of the pleasure of the activity. Unschooling is not the direct path to any of that success, nowhere near it.

And because of the systems of empire dictate what is and is not a valid career path, you ultimately cannot escape. So, to me, challenging the systems of work, schooling and money is actually also highly relevant to challenging empire itself. I hope to help canvas an alternative and explore this deeply over the long-term.