The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their…
The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1 https://t.co/YWIGWFqYsy
Only this allows shifts in the status quo, an interruption of the traditional social hierarchies of status, based on conformity. It’s why movies show the persecution of the ‘nerds’ at school, who don’t fit in with the social hierarchies there. But something has changed. /2 https://t.co/UnDzRggqdj
The ultimate destination for the nerds at school (ridiculous term, but it captures the cultural aspect) was the institutions that ran our societies. Their induction into fields of knowledge stretching back millennia, at school, prepared them for this work. /3
But as populist politics began to attack all of these institutions, calling them ‘unelected’ (the worst insult for a populist), the tension between the jock and nerd cultures of high school in wider adult life became an overwhelming dominance of the jocks. Trump is a jock. /4
It’s one of the reasons I criticise elections. They’re not some noble democratic invention. They’re the translation of high school popularity culture, into adult life. Populists - the jocks - worship elections, convincing most they’re the essence of democracy. They’re not. /5
Democracy is thousands of years old. Mass elections are only 100 years old. There is really no such thing as ‘politics’ or ‘economies’. There’s the same cultural, social life we grew up in, in schools, carried over into adult life, but called different names there. /6
This isn’t an analogy. This is saying that what we take to be political and economic life, is what all human life always is. Social life. Cultural life. Humans ALWAYS act socially, in everything they do. /7 https://t.co/7WIbTchllq
This isn’t to criticise that either. We’re social creatures, to act socially is to be human. And conformity and status allow massive delegation of effort, so not everybody has to know everything. You follow leaders in all areas of life, who guide you in what to do. /8
Schools introduced historical, institutionally embedded knowledge to this process, to allow human groups to steer this social conformity process in new directions. The nerds suffered, but society also progressed enormously, through them. Elections changed all of that. /9
It’s why they’re so dangerous. They’re the way the jocks own everything, all through school, and now all through adult life too. If it’s popular now, it’s allowed. There’s no moderating knoweldge-based counter to it, as we’ve seen with climate change and Covid. /10
We’re electing ourselves to our own destruction. Popularity can never, ever, be a way to run a society. Far too much of what needs doing will never be popular, or should never need to be made popular. We can’t get schools ventilated, because nobody has made that popular. /11
They shouldn’t have to. All of these basic engineering projects society desperately needs are held hostage by the chokepoint of electoral democracy. We live this fantasy that all of ‘the people’ need to be ‘informed’ about everything. Have you ever worked as a teacher? /12
It’s hard enough getting the entire population to learn their times tables. And we want them to understand complex transport and energy networks, water and sewage, communications, defence, environmental design, etc. etc. Popularity-based politics creates this nonsense. /13
Here in Oz a historically ‘Left-leaning’ party now holds government. But does almost no Left-leaning things at all, out of fear they’ll be unpopular. Popularity is the enemy here. Trump has shown how irrelevant traditional political categories now are. /end