Many believe that everything they learn is accurate and unquestionably correct. Why is this? In addition, many students believe everything they read from a textbook is accurate. Again, why? I think it is because education is thought of as a trust worthy institution.
Education has a high moral value in our society and placing lies and misleading facts in our textbooks wouldn’t be right. Sadly, that isn’t the case. Many of the facts and stories we read in our textbooks are misleading or do not cover a specific area on purpose. This is a good time to consider power and social control in our society.
Just another brick in the wall...
I like to share the lyrics of Pink Floyd”s Another Brick in the Wall (pt2) – Lyrics by Roger Waters:
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it”s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you”re just another brick in the wall.”
Who in power decides what is placed in our school’s textbooks? They are obviously trying to condition nationalistic children who look up at this country. That is why our country rarely publishes the Japanese concentration camps we had in California during WWII, or the countless Spanish wars that Wilson stirred up, that would shine a bad light on our increasingly diverse country and portray unheroic icons that made those decisions. Sometimes such information may be included but with imparting information that help insulate certain un-nationalistic bad ideas.
For example, textbook authors may mention the troops withdrawing from Mexico, but fail to mention why they were there in the first place. Most adults do not even learn more history after their high school career and the history curriculum they have learned is biased to serve our country positively and serves who is in power.
More things to consider; why are history textbooks always so bland and boring, filled with end-of-chapter reviews, key terms, etc? Do schools have the power to chose which history book they would like to use in the classroom, if so, what choices are even available? And do any offer a non-nationalistic bias with a more world-view perspective?
To what degree do we falsely learn material? It certainly can not just be our textbooks that we have read to through our adolescents. Although history is a prime source of misleading, unfulfilled, and nationalistic text, there is much more information out there that we must consider.
It is just as easy to amplify false, misleading information through the media. Most people have developed a trust for the media institution much like they have with education, they do not really ‘question’ what they see, hear, etc from our newspapers, televisions, and radios. We must be mindful with the power that is controlling these outlets, or we may be conditioned to their benefit. We can not think that once we are out of the government’s k-12 school system that we are free from power and control, it is merely just the beginning.
It would be interesting to imagine our country if we started teaching our youth (our future) unbiased facts about our history and other fields of study. If we taught them that our country had a pre-Columbus era that consisted with more Spaniards and Indians, then maybe we would have much less racial schematics involved to both those nationalities.
I think our country could still maintain power/control in a more ‘fair’ way, as opposed to feeding us lies. Why are these tactics even being used, and who started them? Is this lying-system a disease that eventually develops regardless if we stay conscious about it? Is it simply part of the building plans for a large society? Surely enough, our western culture is the way it is today, because of these tactics, maybe such racisms, sexisms, and other “isms” wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Many people our being affected by this information-feeding system, and adjustments need to be made. If not, the ‘sheep’ that do NOT question this mysterious society will remain ignorant to this sickening amount of control tactics being employed daily. We need to start herding the sheep and tell them the truth, or we may find this society in a trap that we can never get out of. The lies our teachers have told us are just a fraction compared to the enormous lies being hand fed to us daily.
We must preach sociological mindfulness and other mind thinking strategies to help slow down this process. Even if it is slowed down or eliminated, we may always be suspicious of the truth because both stories and experiences will always be told by someone. We can’t all be a part of the primary sources available and experience everything together, so we must consider trust to some extent. Power and control is just an ever-winding spiral, there is always something to consider and be mindful about.