"Schooling’s Assault on Young Anti-Authoritarians" by Bruce E Levine

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Anti-authoritarians (which Chomsky has said is the basis of being an anarchist) wonder why people don’t rise up against the corruption, inequities, stupidities, and cruelties of our society. Bruce E Levine, a self-defined dissident psychologist, has some answers, and counsels clients and readers alike on how to deal with an authoritarian society and its attempts to marginalize anti-authoritarians, who are regularly scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and assassinated.” Here’s an excerpt from his latest book, Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian―Strategies, Tools, and Models. More of his articles can be found at http://brucelevine.net/category/bruce-levine-articles/
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In this excerpt from Resisting Illegitimate Authority, Bruce E. Levine surveys the means by which conventional schooling punishes anti-authoritarian impulses and primes children for conformity.

Bruce E. Levine
Bruce E. Levine is a practicing clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, among several other books.
November 29th, 2018
“The institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated—and as long as the schools fulfill that role, they’ll be supported.” —Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002
“There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed. . . . Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that.... They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.... You know what they want? They want obedient workers.... People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs.” —George Carlin, “The American Dream” from Life is Worth Losing, 2006

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” —Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” 1973


Resisting Illegitimate Authority by Bruce E. Levine

As a young child in school, before I understood the words authoritarian or dehumanizing, I thought there was something terribly wrong with a place where I had to raise my hand to go the bathroom. I recall thinking that I was lucky that I wasn’t shy, because if I had been too shy to ask for permission, then I might wet my pants. Having to ask permission to go the bathroom was bad enough, but there were teachers who made us either say— or show with our fingers—whether we needed to urinate (one finger) or defecate (two fingers). I remember thinking this must be especially horrific for prim-and-proper girls, and I thought that these teachers must be perverts to demand that.
Nowadays, many kids tell me that they still must get permission from a teacher to leave their classroom to relieve themselves. Recently, a high school student told me that in his school, students get a limited number of restroom passes per semester. I asked him what happens if a student runs out of passes and has to take a shit—do they expect students to just shit in their pants? He laughed. Then I told him that I was serious—what do they expect you to do? Then he got serious and said, “So much of school is fucked up, we never really think about each fucked up thing.”
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram in Obedience to Authority, after reporting on his studies showing a frightening compliance to abusive illegitimate authority, attempted to understand the reasons: “As soon as the child emerges from the cocoon of family, he is transferred to an institutional system of authority, the school,” where the student learns that “deference is the only appropriate and comfortable response to authority.” Standard schools not only demand our compliance to authority regardless of our assessment of its legitimacy, they require our compliance with impersonal authorities. Milgram notes, “the modern industrial world forces individuals to submit to impersonal authorities, so that responses are made to abstract rank, indicated by an insignia, uniform or title.” In other words, badges.
Read more at https://www.self-directed.org/tp/schoolings-assault/

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