More and more as the corporate culture exercises more control over schools, teachers are reduced to the role of imposing “an official truth” predetermined by “a small group of people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic and ideological system.” In order to achieve this teaching task (which ironically is a form of dumbness), teachers must treat students as empty vessels to be filled with predetermined bodies of knowledge, which are often disconnected from students’ social realities and from issues of equity, responsibility, and democracy. This type of education for domestication, which borders on stupidification, provides no pedagogical spaces for students, as Chomsky insightfully argues in this book, “not to be seen merely as an audience but as part of a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively.” Instead, students are rewarded to the degree that they become complicit with their own stupidification and become the “so-called good student who repeats, who renounces critical thinking, who adjusts to models, [who] should do nothing other than receive contents that are impregnated with the ideological character vital to the interests of the sacred order.”

In this education-for domestication perspective, a good student is the one who piously recites the fossilized slogans contained in the Pledge of Allegiance. A good student is the one who willfully and unreflectively accepts big lies, as described in Tom Paxton’s song “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody’s free.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
I learned that war is not so bad.
I learned of the great ones we have had.
We fought in Germany and in France.
And some day I might get my chance.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

Fortunately, not all students willingly and uncritically embrace a pedagogy of big lies, and some are keenly aware of the lies their teachers tell them, to borrow a phrase from James W. Loewen. For example, history teachers try to engage students by using textbooks that “portray the past as a simple-minded morality play. ‘Be a good citizen … you have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has accomplished.” This form of false optimism, according to Loewen, “can become something of a burden for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who notice the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group that has not achieved socioeconomic success. No wonder children of color alienated.” In their alienation, they refuse to accept the received knowledge from the ideological doctrinal system that falsifies and distorts reality in the hope that students will accommodate to life within a lie. It is for this reason that a very large segment of subordinated students resists the doctrinal education by dropping out. It is for this reason, perhaps, that many of these students resonate with Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick in the Wall” (pp. 4~6)