The Peoples' Institute for Re-thinking Education and Development

School is Dead

School has become the universal church of a technological society, incorporating and transmitting its ideology, shaping men's minds to accept this ideology, and conferring social status in proportion to its acceptance. There is no question of man's rejecting technology. The question is only one of adaptation, direction and control. There may not be much time, and the only hope would seem to lie in education -- the true education of free men capable of mastering technology rather than being enslaved by it, or by others in its name....

Technology can kill by poisoning the environment, by modern warfare, by over-population. It can enslave by chaining men to endless cycles of competitive consumption, by means of police states, by creating dependence on modes of production, which are not viable in the long run. There are no certain roads of escape from these dangers. There can be no road of escape at all, however, if men remain enthralled in a monolithic secular orthodoxy. Our major threat today is a worldwide monopoly in the domination of men's minds.  

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