Tyson Yunkaporta ‘yarning’ about the origins and true purpose of the government run public “education system" :

(start with the pics of pages below then read the text below this)

There is a reason ideological battles and culture wars filled with rhetoric about patriotism and nation-building are fought around schools and schooling. Schools are sites of political struggle in this civilisation because they are the main vehicles for establishing the grand narratives needed to make progress possible. The entire history of globalisation hinges on the story of modern public education, how it began and why. I often wonder what would change if people were able to see this story retold from the perspective of an Aboriginal person reading back through old federation documents and the earliest syllabuses from Prussia.

..The story of modern public education, then, is a story of transition between an age of imperialism and an age of modern globalisation. It begins, like all stories about civilisations, with the theft of land from indigenous people. The people were the Prūsai, natives of an area between modern day Germany and Russia, who lived there from at least 9000 BCE. They traded amber and hemp across Europe and into Asia, but mostly lived by hunting and fishing. They maintained this society right up until the thirteenth century.

There weren’t single big nations like today, but pluri-national groups of regions—lots of regions all with different laws, languages and customs: very much like Australia was before colonial occupation. Big countries with one law, one language and one people are a very recent invention designed to facilitate more effective control of populations and resources for economic purposes. This is why, after Rome had left the Germanic regions, the rich landowners struggling for dominance there worked hard to restore the Roman system of social control. They fought to reinstate this power system for a thousand years, with many small states battling each other for supremacy, the Roman eagle standard emblazoned on their coats of arms. This obsession with Rome would cause some problems down the track, particularly for the indigenous Prūsai to the north.

In the thirteenth century, an organisation called the Order of Teutonic Knights broke away from the other German regional groups and decided to create their own new state. The site they chose was Prūsailand, so they invaded and exterminated or assimilated the Prūsai people, making the entire population Teutonic. In classical and fantasy art, however, you won’t find any images of knights wiping out indigenous people. What you will find instead are armoured heroes bravely slaughtering beasts, dragons and mythical monsters. These creatures came to represent the tribal cultures of the world: the romantic European image of the knight slaying the dragon is actually a hidden reference to the systematic genocide of what were called pagan peoples. This European tradition of propaganda in which victims of genocide are portrayed as dangerous animals was later used to great effect against the Gael, the indigenous people of Turtle Island, Jews, and Aboriginees in Australia, who up until half a century ago were often considered animals rather than human citizens.

By 1281, the Order of Teutonic Knights had all but wiped out the native Prūsai and created the new state of Prussia.

Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans who had originally conquered Germania. (Britain and the US later mastered Rome’s imperial method—a system of establishing indigenous elites to keep conquered peoples in check, promoting lateral violence and competition to make subjugated peoples self-policing vassals.) Prussia even adopted the Roman symbol of the eagle as a logo, which was later picked up by the Nazis and the United States. Rome introduced mesmerising dreams of power and control that have not been easy to shake even in modern history.

By the eighteenth century Prussia, under Frederick the Great, had become one of the greatest powers in Europe, despite its small size and lack of natural resources. This was due to the fact that it had a larger permanent military force than anyone else. No other country could force so many of its citizens into the army on a full-time basis. The Prussian system was one of total control, which successfully managed to coerce the population into complete submission to the will of the government. Creating a massive standing army was not a problem for them. (Over a century later, the US military would adopt their formula for maintaining permanent standing armies on the advice of a Prussian military consultant named von Steuben.)

Prussia didn’t stop there. The more rights it stripped from Prussian citizens, the more powerful it became.

The government decided that if it could force people to remain children for a few extra years, then it could retard social, emotional and intellectual development and control them more easily. This was the point in history that ‘adolescence’ was invented—a method of slowing the transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage.

This delayed transition, intended to create a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults, was developed from farming techniques used to break horses and to domesticate animals. Bear in mind that the original domestication of animals involved the mutation of wild species into an infantilised form with a smaller brain and an inability to adapt or solve problems. To domesticate an animal in this way you must:

1. Separate the young from their parents in the daylight hours.

2. Confine them in an enclosed space with limited stimulation or access to natural habitat.

3. Use rewards and punishments to force them to comply with purposeless tasks.

Effectively, the Prussians created a system using the same techniques to manufacture adolescence and thus domesticate their people.

The system they invented in the early nineteenth century to administer this change was public education: the radical innovation of universal primary schooling. Discipline was paramount; boredom was weaponised and deployed to lobotomise the population.

This system worked so well that Prussia became one of the most powerful countries in the world, at a time when the idea of ‘nations’ (rather than regions, kingdoms, tribes or city-states) was first being promoted as the dominant form of social organisation on the planet. The US could testify to the effectiveness of Prussian education as a tool for domination and power, as American educators had been making pilgrimages to Germany for more than half a century. Excitingly, test schools across America proved that the artificially induced phenomenon of adolescence was achievable outside of Prussia, too.

In 1870, Prussia got its revenge on France by annihilating the French military in the Franco-Prussian War, and immediately established Germany as a unified nation state—the dream of the Teutonic Knights finally realised. After that, the Prussian education system (and the new institution of extended childhood) became all the rage around the western world.

Their motto for education was Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, a slogan that the Nazis adopted and later placed above the gates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, used for Jewish slave labour and extermination. There are many schools in Australia today with a similar motto in Latin: Labor Omnia Vincit, work conquers all. Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labour will be in their best interests at some future point.)

Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army.

2. Obedient workers for mines, factories and farms.

3. Well-subordinated civil servants.

4. Well-subordinated clerks for industry.

5. Citizens who thought alike on most issues.

6. National uniformity in thought, word and deed.

And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia.

Not just in Australia, but all around the world, new systems of education, nationalism, finance, corporatism and social control were informed by fascist ideas and theories from Germany and the United States, encouraging the extermination of indigenous people and minorities, just like the white knights of yore.

Cataclysms followed as new nations that had missed out on the empire-building activities of the age of discovery tried to catch up with their land-rich neighbours. When the smoke cleared, lands and power and blame were redistributed unevenly among the survivors and a new world emerged with new stories providing a sanitised history of good triumphing over evil.

But the structural racism installed through Prussian-style schooling and the eugenics movement would not be discarded, merely rebranded.

The language became more politically correct, but the globalising goals of cultural uniformity, economic compliance and homogenised identities remained the same.”

– Tyson Yunkaporta (from his book titled “Sand Talk”)