So-called "education" is obviously a key component of modern thought-control, but my career teaching math showed me how something as innocent as algebra could inadvertently reinforce the system.
First, you should know that in middle school I was advanced from regular math courses into the celebrated "new math" curriculum. I'd been an outstanding math student previously, but suddenly I couldn't understand anything. I failed algebra for three semesters before the administration declared me "learning disabled" in mathematics. Never mind that there's no such thing as a mathematics learning disability, apart from the rare "discalcics" who can't understand numbers and arithmetic. It would make as much sense to say that a student who repeatedly fails history has a "history learning disability."
Yet the diagnosis seemed correct for many years. When I asked knowledgeable friends to show me how to solve simple equations, I always experienced the same, "What? I don't get it!" block as in middle school. I finally learned what was going on when I dared myself to take a beginning algebra course after returning to college in my mid-twenties.
The professor was no help, a Cuban with poor English and illegible handwriting. But the textbook was a miracle. One of an innovative series of self-instructing books by Keedy and Bittinger, it broke algebra down into small perfectly logical steps, explaining the mathematical principles behind every technique and operation. A revelation! I had never been told WHY to do what the teachers said to do, AND THEY DIDN'T KNOW EITHER, or at least how to explain it clearly. The more intelligent my questions, the more the teacher was intimidated—and the more the teacher responded by ridiculing me for not understanding.
I proceeded to be become an award-winning math and physics student, and to successfully teach those subjects for 35 years. My teaching experience strongly reinforced my conclusions. Whenever I'd get a student who said, "I just can't do math," I'd ask, "When did you have your bad teacher?" And there was always one teacher who'd been intimidated and made my student feel stupid for asking important questions. I designed my own two-year high school algebra course for arts-emphasis students notoriously uninterested in math, basing every step on a clear understanding of principles, and dozens of previously "math disabled dummies" excelled in math and came to love it.
When "taught" by teachers who don't understand the principles of algebra, algebra becomes pure obedience-training at its worst, monkey-see-monkey-do, or else. Of course, the entire authoritarian structure of modern education primarily functions as obedience training: submit to the authorities and excel at obeying their orders under high stress, or else. But in the case of algebra, the humiliation is even greater than other subjects. Lacking the mathematical principles that underlie algebra, the subject has NO CONTENT, so the required obedience there is meaningless, obedience for the sake of obedience. Either you "get it" and replicate the demanded actions, or you're "dumb." Naturally this leaves tens or hundreds of millions of students totally incompetent in mathematics, and with a lifelong abhorrence of it. Thought-control, tragically, is the winner: the more citizens feel unable to understand things, the better.
www.enginesofdomination.com
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