A primary function of public education is to psychologically condition students to accept workplace hierarchies and other forms of domination, including the school itself.

Teaching laborers obedience is hardly a new idea. In classical liberal thought, it was formulated in Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith observed that the labor of "the great body of the people" was "confined to a few very simple operations," resulting in widespread stupidity and ignorance:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become (Smith, 1776, p.840).

Overlooking the few individuals who were not engaged in deskilled labor, Smith argued, "all the nobler parts of the human character" risked being "obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people." Public education helps remedy this, according to Smith, and his reasoning is worth quoting in full. The more "the inferior ranks of people" receive instruction,

... the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgment which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it.

Smith's rationale is similar to that of the Bolsheviks and later Communist officials, who believed that psychological conditioning was necessary if Russians were to dedicate themselves to the Soviet system. Article 25 of the 1977 Constitution of the USSR, for instance, explains that the Soviet public education system "serves the communist education and intellectual and physical development of the youth," as well as "trains them for work and social activity."

Subservient attitudes are created by an institutional setting which tacitly assumes that elites run the show (but that they are benevolent), and that if children do well in school then maybe, some day, they can get a job working for a company. This is usually considered becoming "successful" in the "real world," which students enter into after high school. Alternatives to corporate and capitalist work environments are not part of this picture, though; it is never assumed that after high school, students could enter into voluntary arrangements with others in order to set up workers cooperatives, for instance. Other contemporary examples abound. Many high schools, for instance, offer so-called "business skills" courses, in which students are trained to create PowerPoint presentations, use copy machines and laminators, and perform other menial, less-than-empowering tasks. One wonders how often the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies rely on such "business skills" daily.

Likewise, U.S. history courses are replete with heroified accounts of our nation's history and the virtues of American democracy. Historian James Loewen, in his classic analysis of the content in twelve prominent high school history textbooks, observes that

The federal government [that textbooks] picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable. Paradoxically, textbooks then underplay the role of nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in bring about improvements in the environment, race relations, education, and other social issues. In short, textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like other heroes, this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts textbooks into anticitizenship manuals—handbooks for acquiescence (1995, p.210).

Former school teacher and homeschooling advocate John Taylor Gatto describes two other ways that public schools foster subservient attitudes: by creating emotional dependence—through the use of smiles, stickers and red checks, etc.; and intellectual dependence—making students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do (1992, pp.7-9). He considers what might happen if students weren't trained to be intellectually dependent:

Good people tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent: the social services could hardly survive.... Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, the prepared-food industry, and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to poor out of our schools each year (1992, p.9).

One wonders, too, whether the corporate form itself could possibly survive if institutional propaganda did not actively promote its interests.

References 

Gatto, J. (1992). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.

Loewen, J. (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press.

Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Reprinted in 1994. New York: Modern Library.

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