PART 4

Chapter 17:

The “Loop” of indoctrination

We learn to reason in the world of our origin. A whole fabric that we take to be most reasonable was acquired before we could reason, and we pass much of this “taken-for-granted” on through the reproductive cycle. This is a challenge to educational justification, which cannot depend on literal consent. It is also a first source of our indoctrination. The only way out is profound challenge

During debates over the hitting of children – over whether hitting them should be considered an appropriate form of punishment – it was quite usual to hear people arguing in the following way:

“When I was a child, it was a common occurrence, when we did something wrong, for my father to take off his belt and give us a good  walloping with it – and it never did me any harm.”

What is peculiar about these stories is that it isn’t at all obvious to the teller of the tale that their story, instead of justifying their judgment, utterly disqualifies it.

Consider two different variations on the story.

“When I was a child, it was a common occurrence, when we did something wrong, for my father to take off his belt and give us a good walloping with it. I saw it as normal and natural, and it never occurred to me to question it. Even now – it is just the way things were, and he was my Dad. I love him – so I can’t really judge whether it did me any harm or not, because I don’t know  what it would be like to grow up any other way.”

Or

“When I was a child, it was a common occurrence, when we did something wrong, for my father to take off his belt and give us a good walloping with it – but I spent a lot of time with kids who were never hit at all, who were shocked at the idea, and had quite different relationships with their parents when something went wrong. And as I came to understand more about violence and power, and domination, and dignity and respect, and observed what happens when people turned to violence to exact punishment or revenge or resolve conflict, and as I also came to explore my own reactions in the light of these experiences, it made me think more about where my own impulses came from. I became determined never to allow any child of mine to be hit.”

The point of these scenarios is not about the hitting of children, though. It is about how we will, of course, take the normalcy of the judgements from our background for granted, and are unlikely to change them unless they are seriously and effectively challenged.

We are born into our contexts of origin quite incapable of reasoning. We do not even have language at first, let alone see reasons. That context is what is normal and most natural. It is our natural beginnings, and its culture shapes our initial judgements prior to reason – the judgments on which reason is built.

As reasoning begins, what is normal in that background will provide the first and most potent of all reasons – the primary assumptions and presuppositions of naturalness and normalcy. As we grow, the reasons we are given, and which will carry the most weight, will be those of the caregivers on whom we are dependent, and to whose authority – and power – we necessarily submit.

These early reasons will be close to our core. All other developments will be built upon them, refinements of them, or will involve changes to them. Some of these will be buried deeply enough to be a part of our identity, and their influence will persist, depending upon how we handle challenges to them, or anomalies or contradictions that emerge with other things we make of our future experience.

This is the developmental loop inherent in  any educational enterprise. It might also be called the indoctrinatory loop. How is that loop closed? We procreate and re-create a new context of origin for our own children, and our reasons are there at the birth of their reasons. This intergenerational loop binds families together. The person who is saying that the beatings of their childhood never did them any harm is arguing why they should beat their own children.

A common argument when people discuss indoctrination is that we should bring up the young in the manner, beliefs and practices that we think are reasonable, and then, when they reach the “age of reason”, they can choose for themselves. This is a very old argument. It was a common feature of religious indoctrination, but it has appeared equally commonly in discussions of political indoctrination as well. We will bring our children up in our religion or politics, but when they reach the age of reason, they can choose whether to continue with ours or not.

There is a good deal at stake here, and much to risk. Our religion is a matter of faith, and it is the path to salvation. More than this life is involved. We surely do not wish to risk our children to eternal suffering. We bring our children up in our religion out of love for them. But the adoption of the religion is supposed to be a choice, freely made – a matter of free will. And we trust our children to choose wisely when the time comes. After all, they will then deserve to be treated as adults.

But unless the choice is made after what is most natural and normal and most taken for granted has been seriously challenged – the things that have even become a part of our identity – our “we”, since we are a family of this religion – then the cards of the deck have been heavily stacked in favour of choosing the religion of our origin. This is indoctrination.

Thus, if you grow up in a Christian family, you are most likely to continue to be a Christian, and bring your own children up as Christians. If you grow up a Muslim, you are most likely to continue to be a Muslim, and bring your own children up as Muslims. If you grow up among people indifferent to religion, you are most likely to continue to be indifferent to religion,  and bring your own children up indifferent to religion. If you grow up among Democrats, you are most likely to continue to be a Democrat,  and bring your own children up as Democrats. If you grow up among thieves, you are most likely to continue the culture of thievery, and bring up a brood of little thieves.

And the Loop is not limited to families, but to whole countries. If you grow up in Indonesia, or Pakistan, you are most likely to be Muslim, because Muslim families dominate in these countries, and Islamic influence is widely encountered throughout the institutions, and taken for granted. If you grow up in Europe, or North America, or New Zealand, and you are religious at all, you are most likely to be Christian, and Christianity is embedded in the history of shared traditions and practices. You celebrate Easter and Christmas even if you are not Christian. Immigration has meant that conversions to Islam or Buddhism are more common in these countries than they used to be, but this depends upon the increasing exposure of people to Islam and Buddhism. It has come about as a result of changes in human experience, and shifts in the culture. New loops form.

The “age of reason”

There is no age of reason. We just notice that mental and physical development generally heads towards a greater maturity and sophistication as physical maturity occurs – as we “grow up”, but reason is not at all as uniform or predictable as physical growth. There are legal age-points that have been set to acknowledge certain rights and responsibilities. We hope you are ready for them by now. Compulsory schooling ends at a more or less arbitrary age, and has as much to do with reducing unemployment as it has to do with maturity. There is an age after which you are allowed to have legal sex, to drink, to drive, to vote, to go to war.

These are not tests of maturity, or tests of common sense however, and tests that tried to assess such things or set levels for them would have appalling consequences. Among other kinds of unfairness, they would be biased in favour of conventional wisdom, with all the unwise conservatism and conformity that this suggests.

Democracies with popular sovereignty and universal franchise depend on the idea that all adults are basically reasonable, intellectually independent and responsible, and that such people might reach conclusions that others among them might find quite odd, but that they are, nevertheless “old enough to know their own minds”. The core principle is that we treat each other as independent and reasonable adults, and with considerable liberality, despite much ambivalence that we might have about basic adult reasonableness.  There are great costs to not doing so, for once we decide that people are not responsible, we start taking over each other’s lives.

There is an ancient misunderstanding about reason that is perpetuated by the simple equation of reason and age, even if that equation is better understood as reflecting our justified moral wariness; our difficulties in getting a close grip on what learning to reason involves, and responding to its diversity. It is as if “reason” has been thought of since ancient times as akin to having eyes, or ears, and that it differs only in taking longer to physically mature. Thinkers have spoken of certain matters as being “available to reason” for thousands of years – much as physical objects might be available to sight. Natural laws were of this kind.

When thinkers began to pay renewed attention to social contract theories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to attempt to explain and justify political legitimacy, they posited people in “states of nature” of various sorts, prior to social or political convention, but always, somehow, with their reasoning abilities fully mature and intact.

Even when they imagined them living in little village communities, prior to some contract that might create the State, they still assumed the maturity of reason just as they assumed the opposable thumb that enabled them to plough fields and build walls. The opposable thumb, the ability to laugh, these, along with reason, have been thought of as things that distinguish human beings from animals.

“Man” is a “rational animal” – except when “he” is not. The opposable thumb requires some experience to use. The infant must practice at reaching and grasping before the mechanism can work. This is nothing, however, compared with the long trail of learning – including the facility with language and the coherent social relationships – that reason requires.

But we still too often think and speak as if the little urchins arrive in this world with a little bundle they carry over their shoulders on a stick – the bundle that is the gift of reason they have been given, as well as their wants, all ready for the age at which they can be clothed with them. Or perhaps it comes in them as a little seed, merely waiting to be watered as they are on the cusp of the age of reason, that it may burst into flower from their brows.

I have already mentioned the loss of innocence of economists, who laboured with the idea of the rational chooser, and who, in their fall from grace when they discovered that people didn’t think like that, decided (some of them) that this meant that people needed to have their choosing done for them. Surely these anomalies would have been harder to entertain if they had but taken a close look at their own reasoning.

But this is unfair to economists. It is widespread for people to think and act exactly as if our ability to think well, to reason, is a bit of our kit that comes with us – not innate exactly, but not really learned either. When we do think that education in critical thinking would be desirable, it isn’t we who would need it, of course. We just grew up to be the good thinkers we so obviously are. It is those other people, and those children over there, who need to learn how to think. We go to the gym and run around the block and diet for the sake of our bodies, but our minds don’t need any sort of attention at all, except to keep in step with the latest in intellectual fashion. You don’t want to get out of step.

We are content with the age of reason – and an age to drink, to have sex, and to go to war. An age to vote. An age to be a responsible adult. Almost all of us. The only thing that stands between these ideas being the most naive pieces of hopefulness – or even foolishness – and something that could be the foundation of a viable social system, is education. An education that addressed this properly would have to involve a serious effort to undermine the loop – the loop that naturally forms for each generation. No amount of pontificating about having faith in the reasonableness of the average citizen makes that faith justified. The only basis for confidence that we could have is our confidence in the process by which young people have grown into adulthood with a real chance of learning to reason well, to think critically, to genuinely make their lives their own.

Look and see. Have we really made any effort to build such a system?

You will surely be forced to conclude that almost no effort has been or is being made to come to grips with this problem at all seriously. Then you should feel free to contemplate the supposed reasonableness of adult thought and behaviour across the whole social system that is the inevitable consequence. Instead of grappling with this problem in the proper way, governments at all levels fall back on indoctrination – and listen to those economists – which defeats the whole point of popular sovereignty and respect for human value.

The politics of the “loop”

The idea of the loop, and understanding its significance, lies behind and explains some very basic but widely entrenched misunderstandings and misconceptions that are not unrelated to this blinding innocence about the nature of reasoning. These basic mistakes in understanding human experience are so widespread and so important that they rule whole political systems.

Consider the typical political spectrum from the right wing conservative end to the far left – at least as these are commonly held and entertained. The modern far right tend to believe in a kind of self-sufficient individualism. The right are “atomists”, believing in atomistic individualism at the expense of consideration of the social. They underestimate the contribution of the social to the capacity for reason.

The far left on the other hand tends to accept culture and social groups as determining individuals and their minds. They are akin to philosophical “idealists”, though instead of believing that thought determines reality, they believe that social structure determines thought, and thought then determines reality. People and their minds are “shaped” by the social in such a strong sense that they are prisoners of the institutional fabric.

Indeed many try to eradicate talk of the individual at all; largely as a dualistic over-reaction to the atomistic individualism of the right. Any mention of individual human beings is “Individualistic”. People are so social that any individual identity is lost, which also means that all the interstices of unique individual experience within and between individuals are missing. Those who advocate such positions almost never act, in their daily lives, as if they are true; partly because it would be impossible.

The divisions between left and right are, of course, built on a tissue of oppositions, dualisms and dichotomies that it should be our intellectual duty, each of us, to resolve. To admit to being on one side or the other is thus to admit to such intellectual failure, though in practice, people end up on one side or the other because of what offends them in the unresolved side of the duality adopted by those over there. In their opposition to the partiality of their opponents, they allow themselves to be driven, often passionately, into the opposite partiality.

In response to my proposal of the “loop”, people at the right end of the spectrum are likely to emphasize human flexibility and deny the “loop’, or come close to it. They will point to cases of individuals who appear to have broken out of the loop, sometimes making an extreme break. They know or have heard of John or Joan Doe, who grew up on the mean streets, whose father was abusive and whose mother was an alcoholic, but who, despite all this, knuckled down and became the CEO of one of our largest corporations. They will generalize from these cases that anyone can overcome their background, and that, for that reason, remaining in a background of poverty, violence, drug dependency, and criminality is simply a matter of choice. Generalizing from too few instances is, of course, a standard and well-known cognitive bias.

Because of this the rest who remain in apathy and poverty deserve no pity and are, indeed, to be blamed for merely making excuses, and blamed for their laziness if they appear to want more out of life but make no attempt to achieve anything better. They shouldn’t be supported from our collective wealth, because they are where they are from choice, and need even more degradation and indignity to force them out of their comfort zones to better themselves and get a real job, instead of settling back into the ease of welfare dependency.

To help our here, we have our cliches and platitudes that are bread and butter to the self-help industry. “If I can do it, then anyone can do it” – a piece of misconceived humility that masks the complexity of our own histories. And – “anyone can do it if they put their mind to it” – which is true if some sort of proviso is added – yes, anyone . . . if they have had the right experiences at the right times, and have, at those times, been able to draw the right conclusions from them.

They can do it if these experiences have enabled them to put their minds to it in the right way, and there have not been sufficient counter-experiences and interpretations that might create the wrong sorts of feelings; strong feelings of lack of confidence, inadequacy, low self esteem, vulnerability or a whole raft of fears of the consequences if things go wrong. Unfortunately these are the counter-experiences and interpretations that are everywhere in these shattered, degraded and too often despised communities.

Our knowledge of our repeated failures to muster the necessary discipline is also crippling. We learn – we are even taught to believe – that this is who we are. We don’t believe – don’t even seriously consider – that we can do anything about our character. We just can’t engage with the duty of self-respect, or make any real progress to overturn the effects of conditional self-esteem and the companion effect.

It is characteristic of the personal growth industry that its teachers are exasperated when people who say they want some improvement in life, and are shown what they need to do – just won’t do it. The failure rate is extraordinary. Funny thing, human nature.

And so the personal growth movement loses its grip on some of its own insight and stumbles blindly to the political right, without sufficient appreciation of why people might fear plunging into the unknown and changing themselves and their lives, and how our defensive mechanisms can work so dutifully to protect us from even entertaining such terrifying challenges seriously. Exhortatory positive self-talk just doesn’t do it, and the self-help gurus engage so much in positive talk that they lose touch with what is before their eyes. They are interested only in dealing with the downstream effects of the social conditions, and are indifferent to the social conditions themselves.

The irony, of course, is that the right are perfectly correct on one level, entirely wrong on another. On the general level, when we consider human plasticity and the possibilities of learning, they are perfectly correct. All people may, in principle, be capable not merely of log cabin to White House but of the journey to the White House from truly degrading hovels, or even the streets; from the most crippling of contexts of origin.

But the general plasticity of human beings is clearly compatible also with the build up of internal conditions that create insurmountable obstacles to that learning trajectory; or at least obstacles that could only hope to be surmounted by some extraordinary, serendipitous challenge to what has already been made of the experience of that context of origin. The kind of challenge is likely to be the kind that the continuing environment simply does not provide, or continually defeats.

For the external challenge to be effective, moreover, the internal conditions must still have some way, or be at a point that enables the challenge to be met. The conventional interventions from the right just don’t provide such challenge, because they arise from assumptions that have already radically underestimated and oversimplified the problem to such an extent that the solutions it will think of are themselves oversimplified. They never really engage the problem at the point at which the problem exists, simply punishing the incapacitated. Frustration that those people won’t see the world the way we do leads to the ready explanations of laziness and depravity. What else could it be?

Since most people who achieve things they are proud of have had to put some effort into it along the way, perhaps making sacrifices and getting out of their comfort zones, they tend to

see the rewards they have for their achievements as justified because of the effort they have “chosen” to make. Others could get the same results if they just put in the effort too – but instead they refuse to do so while bemoaning their lot. The issue, then, is a moral issue. Those who “succeed” have more virtue. Those who don’t have made their choices, and if they complain about it they should be blamed for not having made the effort.

The mistake is that, before the hard work, there has to have been a purpose sufficient to animate the person to hard work. This has to have been a purpose that, firstly, the person can truly believe to be worthwhile for someone like them, and secondly, it needs to have been a purpose that they can believe themselves capable of pursuing to success.  Remove the obstacles to these two things, and anyone will work hard.

The merit of working hard is embedded in the huge machinery of our Western social systems – called “meritocracies” – which assume fair hierarchies based on that “merit”. It isn’t merit for choosing to do something worthwhile at all, beyond contributing to the creation of wealth, apparently for the society at large. That real and only “worth” is buried deep within the engine of capitalism, which has no ethic, but only the value of wealth-creation. Having no ethic, there isn’t even a concern for what the wealth is for. Hard work is our “contribution to our society”, wealth and “success” are the rewards for our effort, and the society is judged more for the wealth it creates than it is for the benefits all of its people receive from that wealth. Wealth trumps respect.

It doesn’t matter how much social science and history is done that shows that the idea of merit is bankrupt, that the system of selection, far from being objective, actually creates artificial differences among people, or that the differences in experience mean that some people are disabled from seeing options as real – options that are so obvious to those others who do succeed.

The meritocracy, being embedded in the social system, is a common aspect of the loop at all levels. If you are born into a successful family, you are likely to accept the fairness of the rewards you and they enjoy equally, just as those born into poverty and violence, often accept their own lack of merit from the very beginning. If you rose out of such a setting, your own effort and its inevitable success will reinforce the conventional meritocratic ideologies and you will tend simply to create a new, but highly conventional loop befitting your new status.

You got there through making the choices others around you weren’t prepared to make. You know there is nothing special about you. You got there by hard work. As you rise, the people you knew in those streets begin to treat you as something special and different from them. They find it harder to talk to you now. They always thought you were a bit different.

But you know that you were once one of them. You don’t feel any different. You just feel estranged. You can’t quite go home. And it is perplexing, and sad, that they can’t see what you see now. What seems so mysterious and impenetrable to them isn’t really so much at all. As in a dream, you try to tell them but they can’t hear you.

At the other end of the political spectrum, it is common for the “loop” to be treated deterministically. The left has compassion for those trapped in cycles of poverty, unemployment, criminality, drug abuse and violence.  They see it all as a consequence of a fabricated and bankrupt system of merit, but they see the meritocracy as a tricked up instrument for illegitimately distributing power and opportunity; power manufactured by capitalism, which is an amoral system without a shred of the equal intrinsic worth of human beings built into it at all.

The meritocracy is a piece of capitalist ideology. It is there to encourage people to believe in the legitimacy of the unfair capitalist competition for power – because many people still want to believe in themselves as honouring the equal intrinsic worth of all while still believing – on illegitimate grounds – that the advantages they have gained, and seek to gain under capitalism are well-deserved.

The left want to bring capitalism to heal by taming or replacing it in terms or various equalities, in schooling, in the distribution of wealth, in participation in wealth production. If we could but change these inequalities in the structures, everything would fall into place and people would be free to make their own free choices.

The problem is made worse by another misleading element of truth in what the right has to say about this. There is a grey, transitional world in which “getting out” often involves constructing a universe that appears to violate what one “knows to be true”. It is necessary to “fake it ’til you make it” – confidence, dedication, discipline, and passion have to be, in a sense, a pretence and it is a fragile experience that needs to be rewarded with some measure of success if the “fantasy” is to have some chance of becoming “reality”.

There are so many ways in which, for any one individual, this might not work. Lack of support, lack of the right habits, long cultivated anxieties, lack of the right sorts of people, inabilities to see small progress being made, the constant intervention or disruption that debilitates the attempt, and all those lines and stories about oneself and one’s circumstances in one’s social environment that explain why it isn’t working, and cannot work. Conditional social judgment from all those other segments of the community who believe that they deserve, but the poor don’t, helps to keep all this in place.

Both ends of the political spectrum sustain their view in the face of significant anomalies that should be sufficient for each to find somewhere better to stand. The fact that such opposed views have such matching anomalies ought to be a significant clue. Both are, in a sense, quite right, but each overplays and oversimplifies the problem.

The ideologies of meritocracy that pervade the system and provide all the reasons for keeping it in place do much to create and maintain the loops. Focussing on the inevitability of the loops shuts down the individual potential for breaking out of them. It conceals the mechanisms for doing so, and defeats the collective possibility that we could ever create a better system. The meritocracy is, after all, a convention. It is a modern invention, and it can be superseded, just as human agency created it in the first place.

The “loop” is not an iron law

The “loop” can be undermined and significantly transcended in all kinds of ways in each generation if it is effectively and specifically challenged. What we see when John and Joan Doe break out of the cycle of misery is a little glimpse of the effect of the uniqueness of all of the trajectories in a given population. In that world of misery, all trajectories are unique, but few are unique in the ways that enable such visible and dramatic breaks with the initial group – the initial context of origin – within which their uniqueness occurs.

Most of the unique trajectories play out within the bounds of social expectation – both expectations within the group and of those outside it – partly because these expectations are a part of the loop. That is why these breaks are remarkable – worthy of remark – at all. Most of the lines of influence of thought and experience turn back into the group and keep the loop formed.

If we did the old social science trick of imposing a normal curve over a population like this, we would see the small tail of Jane and John Does coming out of the top end. But how to interpret these exceptions to the norm? Convention would involve assigning merit to that tail. These are the ones of ability who pulled their socks up, got out of their comfort zone and moved out of their class.

But why did they do these things? What made it possible? Gumption and ability? But why do we assume that so few have, natively, such gumption and ability, when all across the population, all kinds of gumption and ability have been systematically stifled, killed or defeated from birth – well . . . the sort of gumption and ability that is taken for granted in the social environments of merit, at any rate.

Gumption and ability might in fact be observable within any group in different forms, depending on the gumption that the circumstances require. It might show itself simply in survival on the mean streets, in extraordinary efforts at getting by in such constrained circumstances. What is less likely to occur is the kind of gumption and ability that would enable something outside the loop – that would involve rising out of the class, breaking with the group – gumption and ability that are “unnatural” because they violate the norms and expectations of courage and determination within that setting. Gumption for a young lawyer may not be the same gumption for a drug-dealer.

To really understand why some rise and others don’t, we would need to understand the uniqueness of the individual cases in great detail – a detail largely inaccessible, because our memories are so often cartoons of our histories and the processes they involved, and we aren’t going to remember what we were never aware of, anyway.  Why is one event a wake-up-call, or a last straw, when it wouldn’t have been six-months ago? What was changing in us that made us ready for a new perception? Frequently, that change was gradual, and largely unnoticed.

Tracing the history of our mental pathways involves complex skills of awareness and reflection to recognise the weaving of influence with the threads of emotion running through them. Feeling of surprise, the experience of challenge, or the feeling of being burned, ashamed, embarrassed. Burns that heal, burns that we still feel. Events that we recollect with ruefulness, some leading us to make changes in ourselves. Some we can speculate about, or hypothesise. Some that we can’t locate at all. We suppressed them, or they fell outside our ability to make anything of them, or they occurred too early.

We try to help someone, but they are stuck. They can’t even say why they are stuck, let alone why they did what they did; why they acted on this inclination or that. Perhaps they can’t even acknowledge that they are stuck. Our reasons, good as they are, don’t engage. Sometimes the other person can’t say what it is that seems so much stronger to them than the better reasons everyone has offered them. Sometimes they can, but don’t want to go there. A box that needs to be kept firmly shut. Fears, and we don’t know what they are, and neither do they.

So we just can’t talk about politics, or religion, or aspiration, or trust, or dependability with these people. Self-examination isn’t an option that was ever enabled. And because of this, constructive challenge can’t be enabled either, at least over this. This isn’t just true of the lazy welfare dependent on the mean streets, it is also true of the neo-conservative who blames them, and would have others advantaged at their expense.

Indeed, because the detail can be subtle, historical, dependent on awareness, courage and willingness to disclose, this isn’t just a problem with people we only know casually. Even our own family members, who we should know well, can be inaccessible to us. Sometimes we might guess, but the terrain can be fraught. They don’t want to go there. Can take offence.

This lack of consciousness of ourselves as learning beings, of the inadequacies and twists and turns of our experiential histories, of the things we made of our experience in our immaturity robs us of the plasticity that learning makes possible in the species. It is just our nature. We are fixed this way.

Ironically, some of the people with the best tools for challenge and development are in the personal-development industry, or in various therapies. Ironic because the left, that cares for the damage that these skills can address, are conceptually opposed to the individualism that this would suggest. But therapies and personal development of this kind can only work if there is already some capacity and willingness for self-examination, self-understanding, self-education. That isn’t on any official educational agenda, except at gross levels of behaviour management. “Why did you do that?” “Because”. “I don’t know”.

In many of these stories of rising out of the mean streets, there is an encounter with someone who said or showed something that turned a life around – a teacher, a social worker, a coach. The movies are full of these stories. But what prepared for this experience? What made it possible when for so many others, the little crack of receptivity wasn’t open, when for so many reasons they just hadn’t reached the right moment. How had any sort of seeking been enabled at all?

They just weren’t ready. And even then, it is rarely a single event or phrase that did all the work, though there may have been a moment of acute awareness when such a remark is remembered vividly, remaining as a flag or a sign post in the memory for a crucial turning point. The process of turning that corner is likely to take much longer, and be made up of many small steps and reflections.

For many, too, there are moments of sudden realization, but only a small turn in life is made. Not so much after all, because there is still such a dead weight of disabling beliefs and commitments and denials, fears, vows and limiting experience to be undone. But most of these haven’t been challenged, haven’t been brought into awareness, problematized, and remain largely invisible. That little awareness and its little turning point existed just within a little box.

All sorts of fears hold them in place – losing love, losing our identity, our place in the world, losing the little security that we have, losing the mind we are familiar with, losing control. These are the sorts of things that are in play when we fail to make an impact on others when we see things going wrong for them, and so desperately wish that we could.

When someone does make the break, it may be impossible to find all the elements that enabled it in such a bleak world. The little pieces of firm ground or solid rock that are in just the right places, the many crutches and toe-holds of confidence, of reassurance, of repeated success that offered more to the alternative of breaking out than they did to staying in the same place. The right sort of firm ground, the right sort of confidence.

Not the confidence that you can beat someone in a fight, or turn people against an enemy with the right word in the right ear, or that you can get the money without being caught. The confidence, instead, to constructively doubt the journey that has been set before you. The confidence of courageous and determined and constructive self-examination. The confidence in your ability to find answers, to take action that will open up a better way.

We live in cultural worlds of language and belief. They are made up of harmful ideologies, and dull tracks of thought – so many little boxes and squares. “Think outside the box!”, we are so often told. “Think outside the square!” But they are our boxes, our squares, and we are not going to peep outside them just because people exhort us to do so. We may live lives of misery, but it still seems more comfortable inside this box than what may well happen out there, in the unpredictable, the unknown and potentially dangerous world. It might be awful in here, but at least it is familiar, and we have strategies for dealing with it that might not make things any better, but at least don’t seem to make them too much worse. There is a safety in that, or so we believe. This isn’t just a problem for the poor.

In these cultural worlds, we live in indoctrinatory loops, our reasoning having been set up for us by those reasons that were most natural when we were too immature to appraise them. Just because most of us do leave the nest, and take on careers different from our parents, live in different places, meet different people, even alter our beliefs about religion, the loop usually loosens a little for a time, and the little that it does is our reassurance that we are adults, rational and free and that our minds are our own.

But these new places we find are foreign at first, and our job is to master them as they are, to find acceptance in them, to take on the new conventions. They challenge our past, but the challenge of the new place is to master its rules. To fit in. People in these places live within their own loops. If we are lucky, they welcome us into them.

Challenge, the nature of the challenge, and what we are able to do with it is the key. It is the challenge to ourselves, to our understanding, to what we are inclined to believe or to do. It is to problematize our lives, with a willingness to transcend the problems, so that we loosen the loops, so that we properly grow. But it has to be a challenge that we are willing to seek, that we are ready to meet, that we can have the confidence to accept.

This life of doubt and exploration and inquiry and curiosity and reasonableness isn’t at all the same as adopting the role of the rebel, the sceptic, the one who always challenges authority. These too, are alternatives and options, but what I have always been describing is the process that generates and explores the options and tests them, while trying not to preempt them.

All of this challenge is why systematic and sustained educational communities of enquiry are essential to freedom. They reflect on the stuff that, within the loops, are mistaken for the natural or the inevitable, or the unquestionable. They reflect on them in a place apart, and with the equally enquiring and doubting thoughts of others – who share a great deal with you, but are never quite in your personal and unique loops. That is why different people have different epiphanies and surprises in such groups. We learn, but we learn different things.

This is what mental freedom – which is real freedom — is about. The purpose is to break down the mental chains, but that does not even entail that we will necessarily abandon worthwhile aspects of our old life or relationships. They just won’t be chains. They will be choices – relationships and commitments that were once blind, but that we can now hold to freely if we have thoroughly tested them, and they still come up well, or are even improved. Or we will be free to abandon them, choosing something that, through careful testing, we have concluded is better.

Both the left and the right are half right. The left are right that the game is rigged, and that the massive incapacities that we see the lower down the scale we go are heavily dependent on the rigged game, which more firmly creates the conditions for incapacity the more the game is rigged against them.

The right are half right in the recognition that the left’s inclination to view incapacity in terms of victimhood only makes that incapacity worse; entrenching it. There is personal work that does need to be learned, and performed. But the conclusions that the right draw from this are totally bankrupted from a wickedly impoverished understanding of the development of choice that leads them to idealise and legitimate the institutions that do so much to create the incapacities, and disable the potential for self-respect that all of us have. They oversimplify the social.

In a sense, the right aren’t individualistic enough. They trivialise individual personhood, denying the uniqueness of each person’s individual history of experience, and the unique construction of the powers they have to make of their experience what they do. Because they oversimplify the social character of the powers of construction and their role in personal uniqueness, they oversimplify the problem. They oversimplify their own insight, and thereby oversimplify the solution.

Suppose the left were given what they wanted. The invidious social structures would be reconstructed with far greater equalities and far greater participation. This would be a huge, but very raw step towards the creation of social structures that are educational. But in this alone, it would not inevitably mean that they were educational in any detail at all. There is nothing in this that would even notice the rampant indoctrination that would continue to arise and persist, let alone ensure that the institutions facilitated properly educational and disciplined dialogue. They might be equal, but very likely they would still be educationally toxic and barren.

And the population would no more pop with rationality in their heads than they do now. They would still largely be trapped within loops that would be remain untested. There is nothing to suggest that the capability of working out worthwhile lives would be any better secured, because the left haven’t grasped the significance of the uniqueness of individual lives, and have no articulate educational vision for them. Indeed, many on the left would simply celebrate the cultures of unawareness that currently exist.

The right would, with as much justification as they do now, personalize the inevitable social problems that would continue to exist by claiming that all those inert, perplexed and dependent members of the society needed to do was get a life, work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps; just like we did. As things now are, they would say, with all this equalization, the gumption of those who do put in the effort is being unappreciated.

Both the left and the right still support universal, compulsory State schooling, with perhaps the difference that some on the right would like to have a piece of that action for private profit. Neither have any conception of education adequate to the problems that both squabble over. Neither do enough to acknowledge the role of the loop, or to appreciate what challenging it would entail. Neither seem even to be conscious of the possibility of learners understanding and taking control of their own education. Neither appear to have any real notion of worthwhile living, or what creating it might entail.

The inevitability of conventional schooling as a “loop”

If you have truly grasped any of this, you will have been waiting for me to make some comment about the other old elephant in the room. Yes, philosophy isn’t the only one. This one is conventional schooling. If you think that loop-breaking is easy, or that loops are innocuous, then you surely have to explain why the whole world doesn’t rise up in wrath and demand that conventional schooling  be replaced by something better.

It doesn’t of course. It thinks that the very proposal is absurd. “I have never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life”, as I have been told. This is despite the evidence. The abundant historical, sociological and psychological research against conventional schooling should itself be enough, quite apart from the devastating critiques by practical people who immersed themselves in schooling and eventually concluded that it had to be wrong – the people who largely inspired all that scholarship.

Quite apart from the leading management theorists who see it as the greatest obstacle to effective management. Quite apart from the role it plays in transferring our taxes back to the employers, in the form of vocational training; the employers who pay the wages and salaries that the tax comes from. Quite apart from its institutionalizing  and factory character; something that we seem to have objected to in the treatment of the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled, but not for the rest of us. Quite apart from the demonstrations that its function in creating a fair meritocracy is largely a myth. Quite apart from its failure to deliver an adequate moral education. Quite apart from the intellectual dependency that it creates. Quite apart from its failure to concern itself with critical thinking, or the ability to engage in rational debate and enquiry; at odds with supposedly core values of freedom of speech and thought and self-determination and democracy itself. Quite apart from the fact that it patently does not put the learner first. Quite apart from the ways in which it does so much to form our lives and expectations into conventional channels – the little boxes that we can’t think outside.

Even more puzzling, there are those many, many people who will admit most of what I have just said – who feel that conventional schooling is deeply wrong – but who make not the slightest move to do anything about it. These people are everywhere. They will still send their children to school and worry about their performance despite their knowledge that the schooling process is doing their children harm.

But they do have an out. Do you know what it is? “But what’s the alternative?”. Even the professionals say this.

There is this secret. I’ll whisper it to you.

No one is looking for an alternative. No one is encouraged to find or develop an alternative. Not even encouraged by you.  This, despite all the knowledge that we have – from experience and research across so many fields. It is a career-killer even to  consider it.

Perhaps you didn’t hear that. I will say it again.

No one is looking for an alternative. No one is encouraged to find or develop an alternative. Not even encouraged by you.  This, despite all the knowledge that we have – from experience and research across so many fields. No one, no organization or institution has ever shown the slightest interest in throwing money at it. It is a career-killer even to consider it. I’m living proof.

I began working on this forty years ago because it is clearly the most important issue in education, and nobody else was touching it. My teachers and colleagues in graduate school supported me, but afterwards, as I remarked in an earlier chapter, I tended to be told that it couldn’t be done, or that we should wait for a genius. I still figured that a genius might only pay attention if someone was actually making an effort. What does it say about us if we acknowledge an awful problem – awful on this scale – but then do literally nothing to address it?

Oh, to explain all this!

I can, of course, explain this otherwise incredible form of denial and resistance. Short of religious fanaticism, this is just about as powerful as loops can get. The indoctrinatory loop may not be an iron law, but here is an example which we seem unable to loosen, let alone break, across the community at large.

We are born into a family world which assumes our schooling as firmly as it assumes anything about our future – a family world that is, indeed, usually anxious that we “succeed” in it. So the loop doesn’t just start when we enter kindergarten, or pre-school. It is there from the very beginning. Then we live the days of our childhood and youth in schools – years of immersion in which the good of schooling is one of the most enduring taken-for-granteds in our lives while our attention is diverted by the things we are set to learn, and the rules and conventions we are forced and induced to obey.

In it, we are taught to take responsibility for our successes and our failures – to personalize our performance, so that even when we fail or revolt, we class ourselves as failures, or behaviour problems, while the inevitability and necessity of schooling is maintained. In my experience, school failures themselves fervently believe in the importance of schooling. Well, they have been told that often enough. What does that say about how they inevitably see themselves?

Within schooling, most peculiarly, the one institution that should stand out as a major aspect of life and society that is not being studied, let alone studied critically . . . is schooling itself, and we can guarantee that if it was studied, it would be a study steeped in its own ideology, and not remotely critical. We may have had some bad experiences in our schooling. We may even have hated it. But it has formed our core conviction. We can’t imagine a world with anything significantly better, and don’t even try.  At best, just a sort of improved schooling.

So what would it take, do you think, for you to think outside this square? What would have to be prized loose, unshackled, chipped away, for this loop that binds you to be loosened enough for you really to make a choice about it? What would have been the path that led you to a significant wake-up call?

But then –  of course – you spent all those years at school, and it didn’t do you any harm.

Did it?

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018