Education or Indoctrination?
A Lesson In Obedience and Poppycock
Read time: Approx 5 mins
School…the “great ladder of opportunity”…the noble institution that prepares you for life, sharpens your mind, and turns you into a “productive citizen.” But, have you ever looked closely…like really closely? It feels a lot less like a path to freedom and a lot more like a boot camp for obedience.
Bells ring…desks line up like soldiers in formation…permission slips are required for basic bodily functions…grades are doled out as dangling carrots, and detentions as reminders of our less-than value. The real lesson is no longer “education.” It’s conformity…learning to silence curiosity, manage impulses, and follow orders with a smile. And once you’ve marinated in that system for a decade or more, you’re perfectly primed for something else: the epidemic of pseudo-profundity.
Picture a six-year-old. Pure chaos... Overflowing with questions and emotions…Why’s the sky blue? Why do birds fly south? Why is Dad so cranky every Monday morning? You’re bursting with curiosity. And society’s brilliant response? Stick you in a box and glue you to a chair. Ring a bell every 60 minutes. Teach you to ask permission to speak…or pee. Reward you not for curiosity, but for obedience and performance.
From day one, school teaches you to swap your wonder for recognition. The “right answer” isn’t the one you thought through…no, absolutely not. It’s the one printed in the textbook and beaten into you by repetition. Over time, you stop asking, “Is this true?” and start asking, “Will this get me a good grade?” That distinction matters. Once your brain learns to equate recognition and praise with truth, you’ll swallow anything that feels familiar and gets a nod of approval. That’s exactly why we eat up hollow phrases like, “The universe gives you what you’re ready to receive.” It’s not really as profound, once you adjust the lens…it’s more like a dubious fortune cookie. But it sounds like the answer key.
I’m not convinced this was by accident...The structure of modern schooling is slowly showing its true colors…that it was built to serve the machine. In the 19th century, industrialists and politicians needed a workforce that was punctual, obedient, and good at following instructions. Farmers and dreamers didn’t cut it in the wake of exponential population expansion. So…they borrowed the Prussian model of education, designed explicitly to create disciplined soldiers and compliant citizens…and applied it to children.
Rows of desks mirrored rows of machines.
Bells drilled time discipline into your bones.
Schedules trained you to slice your life into neatly-packaged time blocks, each dictated by someone else.
Uniforms, grades, punishments created hierarchies of obedience.
Forget about “awakening young minds…” The goal was ultimately about producing predictable workers for the factory floor. Now, apply that same principle, but for the office cubicle and open-plan corporate zoo…where “collaboration” means nodding in unison while pretending we didn’t just have this same meeting 45 times over the past six months…
It’s true that schools teach reading, math, and how to regurgitate facts on command. But the real curriculum is invisible:
Obedience: “Learn to wait your turn, raise your hand, and never color outside the lines.”
Compliance: Memorize answers. Don’t question why or whom this serves. Healthcare education kindly adopted this one…
Approval addiction: Crave the gold star, the A-plus, the teacher’s smile.
Timeliness over curiosity: Bells cut off wonder mid-thought. What matters is punctuality…not natural exploration.
By the time you graduate, you’re fluent in the unspoken rules…don’t question authority, don’t trust your instincts, and for God’s sake, don’t you dare rock the boat.
But school doesn’t just make you obedient. It makes you vulnerable to nonsense. Why? Because real thinking is uncomfortable. It requires humility…it means being wrong, wrestling with complexity, and asking hard questions that threaten the hierarchical status quo. School often trains us to fear wrongness…to see mistakes, not as part of learning, but as failure.
So…as adults, when someone…or, these days, AI…hands us a slick phrase that sounds right…“Everything happens for a reason,” “Move fast and break things,” “Love is the only real currency”…we lap it up like rabid dogs at a meat raffle. It’s safe. It gives us the satisfaction of “knowing” without the discomfort of doubt. This is the psychological link between schooling and made-to-appear-profound bullsh*t. The classroom conditions us to accept surface-level answers. Adulthood just switched the content, from multiple-choice tests to corporate mantras and Instagram memes.
It’s everywhere…
Wellness culture drops faux-wisdom nuggets, like “detox your energy” or “raise your vibration.” Translation: buy this overpriced juice powder and subscribe to my pretentious BS.
Silicon Valley gives us slogans like “Fail forward” or “Move fast and break things.” Translation: we don’t care about consequences or humanity, as a whole, as long as we profit.
Politics gives us “Make America Great Again,” “Build That Wall,” and “Yes We Can.” All empty, all wildly effective, some blatantly racist…
These are not so much philosophies as much as they’re catchy sound bites. They feel profoundly wise but collapse under scrutiny. And because we were trained from childhood to accept sound bites as wisdom, we don’t stop to ask the obvious…What the f*ck does this actually mean? Who benefits if I believe it? Because someone does. Always.
Enter the information apocalypse. Trained on oceans of human text…poetry, science, email semantics, Reddit rants at 3AM…AI spits out whatever sounds plausible. It doesn’t know truth from nonsense. It knows rhythm. It knows the pattern of profundity. And it hallucinates frequently…and with terrifying confidence.
Ask it for a quote about resilience and it might say, “As Aristotle once said, the stars shine brightest when the night forgets its name.” Total fabrication... Yet most people would nod along, post it to LinkedIn, and call it God-granted wisdom. AI didn’t invent this Joel Osteen level of quackery, but it definitely helped mass-produce it. It’s the factory model all over again…only this time the product isn’t obedient workers. It’s obedient thinkers.
This isn’t exactly harmless. A society trained to confuse vibes with truth is much easier to control. When you’ve been conditioned to seek approval and swallow slogans, you accept exploitation, rather than resist it. You trade your intuitive creativity for productivity. You trade your instincts for performance reviews and promotions. You trade your soul for “success,” even though you never got to define what success meant in the first place.
There is an unfortunate tragedy in this whole ordeal…by the time many people wake up to the BS, the damage is done. The $200,000 degree is framed. The mortgage is signed. The “decked out” SUVs are locked and loaded in the 4-car garage. The curiosity has been drained. And the slogans that once motivated you now feel like titanium chains…
Real education should not make you obedient. On the contrary… It should make you ungovernable. It shouldn’t hand you slogans, but it should hand you discomfort and teach you how to think, not what to think. In truth, real education would likely destabilize the very systems that benefit from your compliance…You won’t find it in the curriculum…You won’t find it in a motivational meme that's been shared 30 million times. You’ll find it in the books censored by the state for thinking outside the box, in conversations that make people shift in their seats, and in creating something nobody asked you to create. Real education is messy, inconvenient, and alive. And for that very reason, it terrifies every system built on control and profit.
Is there a way out of this hamster wheel of faux-brilliance and quackery? Maybe…If we stop mistaking recognition for truth and stop re-posting quotes we don’t even understand. Maybe, if we stop outsourcing our minds to apps, memes, gurus, and corporate mission statements. I just don't see that happening in this societal environment…
If you want to reclaim your own education, you’ll have to steal it back. Read out of pure curiosity…like your life depends on it. Ask questions no one wants answered. Seek out your own weird tribe of people who’d rather wrestle with ambiguity than nod along to empty quotes, slogans, and spoon-fed statistics. Create something…for no reason other than to remind yourself you’re not a gear on a machine.
School taught us to love the cage…the hamster wheel…fine lines that make us feel empowered while, quite literally, doing the exact opposite. This instantly-available, pretentious, faux-wisdom keeps us distracted and shackled…But its power is lost the moment we ask the forbidden question: What the hell does this actually mean? What's the big picture?
Once we stop swallowing bullsh*t, we can finally be hungry enough for the real thing.
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