Education for Obedience
In response to the video "Education for Obedience"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50ZebmQq51Q
from the channel
Libertarian Communist Platform
54.5K subscribers
There's a lot to be said about education for obedience, but your fundamental premise is completely wrong. It's hilarious to see someone complaining about Capitalism as "authoritarian", while advocating for Communism, which produced the most evil, fascist, genocidal regimes on the planet! To pretend that this has anything to do with Capitalism demonstrates a total ignorance of the very meaning of the term or the concept.
I'm Swiss - Switzerland is probably the most capitalist society on the planet. We are also the only country that enjoyed direct democracy (the ONLY form of actual democracy) for 700 years! Switzerland was born out of the rejection of an empire. Those mountain peasants defeated every single attempt to subdue them militarily - they won every war and almost every battle from 1291 to 1515, until no one tried to attack them anymore. They were considered to be "anarchists" (first reference in the English language from the 14th century to Swiss people mentioned "switzerizing anarchists") as they had no centralized government. Most cantons decided important issues through public votes. The entire population gathered in a public square and voting by raising their hands.
When I went to school, in the 1960s, public education was entirely under the control of every village and town. My home village started the school year in spring, the canton capital, 5 km away, started the school year in fall. That's how large the autonomy of this little village of 300 people was. The same applied to the teachers. They all were free to choose their own teaching style.
I had a fabulous teacher of history. He never asked us to memorize dates. Typical test: He would give us a letter and ask "Who wrote this letter? To whom? What was the context? What did he want to achieve?" Everyone hated his tests except me - I loved them. The others all complained that they didn't now how to prepare for them. Because they only knew how to do rote learning.
He never said "Marx was an imbecile". He read an entire chapter from one of Marx's books which left no doubts about the fact that Marx was an absolute retard who had no idea what he was talking about - and the issue of that chapter wasn't even a political one! I don't know how anyone can get past the first page of "Das Kapital" without throwing that book into the fire because it's so unspeakably stupid...
Standardized tests are an absolute perversion. Fortunately, we never had them in Switzerland. Contrary to your assumption, they are actually the product of collectivist, egalitarian thinking. They are NOT supposed to "create a hierarchy", they are supposed to remove individual differences from the outcome of tests and the requirement for deeper understanding.
Switzerland has a very interesting education system, in which selection is strong, but anyone who did an apprenticeship can later re-enter higher education and get a degree, e.g. because he decides to go into management or launch his own business - which a lot of people with apprenticeships do. One of the former presidents of Switzerland's biggest bank, UBS, was the son of an immigrant worker who joined the bank as an apprentice. This is no exception. My own grandfather was from a poor family, entered a textile factory as apprentice and became the director of that factory when he was 30. Based on his competence.
This flexible, open system serves Switzerland well, as it went from a very poor, agrarian country it still was in the 18th century to the European country with the highest per capita income by 1875. It still remains the country with the highest average and median wages, with an incredibly diversified economy: financial services represent only 4% of the GDP. Almost 30% are based on industrial production. We have also been rated "most innovative country in the world" for more than 10 years (WIPO and others). Innovation obviously requires free thinking, which is why Asian countries - which have always been very authoritarian - struggle with.
In every society, there are hierarchies. Of course there are also hierarchies in Capitalism - hierarchies of competence! When you need a doctor, you want the best possible doctor. When you have a problem with your toilet, you want the best possible plumber. Capitalism allows everyone to remain outside of any hierarchies, if they so please, by working independently or by creating his own business.
I spent more than 35 years working as independent. I worked on average 8-9 months per year and was free to travel the rest of the time. I worked on 4 continents for innumerable clients, from several top 10 corporations on the planet to various administrations, aid organizations, small businesses and individuals. My work allowed me to gain deep insights into the problems people all around the planet experience, including engineers, doctors, various industries and bankers. I also saw how hierarchies work from the outside. Which ones are efficient. Which ones fail.
Businesses that implement very rigid hierarchies typically do badly in a competitive market. Businesses that rely on intelligent, independent and free thinking workers do very well. So it's simply absurd to claim that "Capitalism" would require "obedient workers". Simply not true.
This is a short introduction to what Capitalism actually is and how it leads to massive economic growth for everyone:
The end of slavery came with the beginning of modern Capitalism and it was the most industrialized country, the UK, which first decided to make slavery illegal and which hunted down slaver ships. The least capitalist countries on the planet still cling to slavery today.
Capitalism is inherently anti-authoritarian. I'm always baffled by how people can possibly misunderstand this. It's precisely because Capitalism always topples any existing hierarchies that the ruling classes hate it. Why do you think the WEF, rich Hollywood stars and the entire gang of Big Tech billionaires support Marxism?
There is EARNED wealth and there is UNEARNED wealth.
The people who didn't really achieve much on their own, who got rich by inheritance or by mere luck tend to suffer from guilt and fear. Hollywood stars do not see their acting performance as justifying the great wealth they earn. Bill Gates knows that he didn't do anything exceptional - he ripped off MS-DOS from some smart guy, repackaged it and sold it to IBM, whose CEO was friends with his mom. He obviously knows that he didn't deserve to be the world's richest man. Jeff Bezos just created a glorified sales system. He doesn't feel like he deserved his wealth, either. Soros worked as speculator. Zuckerberg stole the Facebook code from 2 other guys and was just lucky that it turned into a global success. The founders of Google just created a little algorithm and were incredibly successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
What did they do to cope with their excessive wealth?
Bill Gates created Slate and MSNBC, 2 of the worst Marxist propaganda tools in modern times.
Jeff Bezos bought up the Washington Post, also absolute garbage propaganda for the far left.
Soros finances endless Marxist propaganda tools such as MoveOn, Progressive and all those "woke" DAs who are destroying the justice system.
Zuckerberg and Google systematically support "woke" propaganda and block or shadow ban conservative and libertarian views.
These billionaires control most of the media. And what to they promote? "Woke" garbage. Marxism. Critical Race Theory.
Bill Gates financed "Common Core" education, which can truly be seen as an intentional attempt at dumbing down kids. The call to "decolonize" education is the same - dumbing down pupils and students. The German "green" party (green Marxists) actually published campaign posters that use a black girl as illustration of why "hard" branches (math, German...) should no longer count for the high school diploma. Yes, the "anti-racists" were ultra-racist.
As the book "Guilt, Blame and Politics" documents, the US communist party was always run by trust fund babies - kids from immensely wealthy families who promote communism to alleviate their guilt over their unearned wealth - without ever giving up their wealth.
Bill Ayers, former Weatherman terrorist, ghost writer of Obama's book "Dreams of my father" and probably architect of his electoral success, is the son of an extremely wealthy lawyer who knew just how to get him out of a prison sentence for the accidental murder of his girlfriend with one of his bombs.
Bill Ayers: "I Wrote Dreams From My Father"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfIZDYm0a54
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, never had those problems. He really was incredibly creative and worked very, very hard for every one of his creations - I'm NOT saying that he was nice. He did rip off his best buddy, Steven Wozniak, in the very early days for a few thousand dollars. He still demonstrated incredible genius and fought very hard to implement his visions. Hence he never felt guilty for his wealth. He was a Randian. I'm sure he would be really upset to see how his company is being abused for "woke" propaganda.
Since the 1960s, the far left has taken over the entire education system and has been promoting Marxist ideology. So clearly, those "evil industrialists" (we are all capitalists!) did not really pay much attention to the education system, after all. The universities are even worse. There is of course the influence of the USSR, until the end of the 1980s (cf. Yuri Bezmenov, KGB defector who explained the Soviet propaganda strategy - cf. videos here on YouTube), which was then replaced by the CCP, which started handing out very large grants to US universities and bought influence from the media and Hollywood.
The ONE thing one can say with absolute certainty is that anti-capitalist and anti-western propaganda in schools did NOT produce critical, independent thinkers! It produced SJWs who are completely unable to formulate a single idea coherently. And that's apparently the goal of those anti-capitalists who try to take over. Because it's just too damn hard to remain rich when the competition can sell better products...
How the media flip out over Elon Musk and his attacks on big government is more than telling... no one says that Elon is "the good guy". His choice to produce electric cars, milking the idiotic climate propaganda, was not a strictly ethical one, but he sure knows how to poke the authoritarian bear. I'm sure that - as real industrialist - he has no interest in brainwashed sheeple. I bet he wants to hire highly intelligent, independent thinkers with whom one can have an actual debate.