Education

From the Trivium Study Guide:

General Education has not been the focus of the contemporary schooling establishment but, rather, social engineering . . . it is a vile and protracted form of miseducation.

After adopting the Prussian Education Method in America in the middle to late-19th century, this fault in educating our nation, from the perspective of the general citizenry, was compounded by applying the dangerous tenets of the Pragmatic Philosophy devised by William James and John Dewey. The party line is that children need to be surrounded by their peers in order to socialize properly in preparing them for life.

Socialization is a natural process to people, it need not be taught to them; or, more to the point, programmed in them. Children need to be around family, neighbors, and a few close, genuine friends when younger; and participants in church, social, civic, and charitable organizations in adolescence. Friends and organizations just described have their time and place in a young persons life - they are not all-consuming intrusions as modern primary and secondary schooling establishments try to make themselves.

There are self-serving, domineering social entities which perceive a gain from having general populations presented with only the protocols of a field of study and to have withheld the rationale of that field of study.
The knowledge of the rationale of subjects for understanding, and the protocols for the expression or application of those subjects comprises what is addressed in a General Education.
The rationale provides the all important understanding as to why a subject or proposition is integrated and self-intelligible by presenting the entire thought process (the validated arguments) behind the rationales conclusions.
The protocol is a set of instructions spawned by that consolidated understanding (of the rationale) with which to manifest an expressed outcome.
By presenting only protocols, outcome-based education (which is, in reality, mind control or programming) is the openly stated goal of public schooling, not general, understanding-based education.

Our country is populated by the products of this policy of having only protocols presented and committed to memory.
These products are designed to be obedient soldiers, pliable employees, imprudent consumers of goods and services, and otherwise uncritical servants of established corporate and statist interests.

In not being trained to think critically and creatively, students are programmed in reading and thinking only to the level of abiding to instructions (e.g., reading a procedural manual or slavishly following edicts from on high issued by so called authorities).
Unfortunately, this is a mind numbing action which becomes insidiously habituated.
To be under the rule of task masters; to dictated as to what to think by others or via the media; to labor under the illusion of being a well informed individual; to become a stillborn adult, a life long adolescent - these are the results of our century old institution.

The ideal of self-determination is trampled mercilessly and in its place grows self-alienation. In being aggressively indoctrinated not to think . . . that is, in being programmed against our very nature, is it any wonder most of us live in a constant state of lowlevel fear and are anxiously disoriented in an ocean of chaos without the ability to judge as to what are appropriate and beneficial goods and values?

Man cannot long live or maintain health without his primary means of survival; the exercise of his rational thought.