The Origin of the Problem (Chapter 2 of the book "The Hijack of Education")

 

The Origin of the Problem

Education is the panacea for all social evils.

Noble men, philosophers, philanthropists and social reformers have stressed the need for education. Was that only to increase literacy rates and career opportunities?

No! Education has the potential to solve all the problems of the world. It is the solution to all social evils. Holistic education can solve all the problems of the individual, whether they are issues related to health, wealth, career or relationships. The solution to all global problems can also be found with the help of holistic education.

However, this immense potential of education is lost in the practical world. We see that education has become a business, rather than be a service to mankind. We see that it instigates competition, ambition, apathy, jealousy, selfishness and many other vices in the individual, and hence, in the society. Education has actually become a root cause of many problems, rather than provide solutions to all the problems.

There is a  reason for everything. Surely, there are reasons behind the failure of the educational system as well? What could be the reason for this huge gap between the theory and the practice of education? Why have we failed to tap the immense potentiality of education?

The answer lies in how education has been hijacked and misused by some very powerful people who virtually rule this planet. These people have given education an orientation that suits their interests.

Education that can transform the world, aims at all-round development of the students. It aims to create better human beings in every aspect of life. With the help of these better human beings, it aims to create a better society.

However, we see a different type of education in practice. We find it subservient to the economic system. The economic system is controlled by a handful of people. These people influence other systems with their immense wealth. This has been the fate of the educational system too.

What the economic system wants is human resources. Every student grows up to be an adult and do productive work. Whatever work a student would do in the future, he or she will be considered human resource by the economic system.

The economic system wants an educational system that will cater to its needs by producing more and better human resources. The educational system creates such human resources as demanded by the handful of people running the economic system. These people make more profit with this kind of tailor-made education.

An exploitative economic system would want an educational system that disempowers the students and subjugates them into indirect economic slavery very cunningly.

This system of education does not want all-round development of the students, their empowerment or betterment. It wants them to be underdeveloped, weak and dependent so that they can be economically exploited, without their awareness. It wants them to fit into a society that is already strongly influenced by the wealth of a few. It creates human resources akin to money-churning machines.

This system also creates unemployment (surplus supply of human resources resulting in low wages), poverty (to keep people weak and compliant), economic disparity and exploitation of labour.

We discuss the evidences of this unholy nexus between education and economics next.

WHO CONTROL OUR EDUCATION?

1) Education and Economics: We all know that education has been commercialized all over the world. It is a business now.

We also know that education can become a tool to brainwash little children. Radical forces brainwash students. They do this to prepare human resources and create support bases for themselves.

Indeed, education creates desired work forces. The basis of Economics is not currency or wealth; it is these work forces better known as human resources.

Students are the future human resources. The knowledge, belief system and the very nature of the student can be shaped through ambient influences affecting the subconscious mind, indoctrination and rote learning to make them serve the economic system.

We reach the conclusion that education can be corrupted by money.

We know that the economic system has its masters and designers. There is a wealth transfer taking place by means of which the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer. The following paragraphs will provide adequate proofs of this wealth transfer. We will look into the mechanism of the economic system later on.

2) Wealth and Income Inequality, Economic Divide: There was a slogan in the Occupy Wall Street Movement of 2011: We are the 99%. It referred to the income and wealth inequality between the richest 1% and the remaining 99% of USA's population. The social and economic divide, greed, corruption and undue influence of the corporate sector on the government were the main agendas raised by the protesters.

These problems were faced by the 99% of people in the USA. But they were not specific to that country alone. They were global problems, and they are even more relevant after a decade. This is obvious because the world has become one little village and multi-national companies rule the planet.

The Occupy Wall street Movement later gave rise to the global Occupy Movement. This was held in 2012 in around 82 countries.

Credit Suisse is a globally renowned financial institution. It conducts economic surveys every year. Its global wealth report said that the richest 1% of the world's population owned 50.1% of the world's total wealth in 2017. It referred to the wealth distribution pattern as the "Global Wealth Pyramid", a term that appears in Wikipedia too under the topic "Distribution of Wealth" in the section "Wealth Inequality".

The Oxfam Inequality Report also gives stunning figures. It says that 1% of the total population grabbed 82% of the wealth created in 2017. The 2021 report says that 10 richest people own as much wealth as the combined wealth of bottom 3.1 billion people, which is almost half of the world's population. Also, the wealth of these 10 people doubled during the pandemic.

Now, the bottom portion of the population will scarcely have any wealth to hide in shell companies. Can we guess which portion of the population will have more unaccounted black money hidden in places like the shell companies or the Swiss Bank? Will it be the 99% or the 1%? It has to be the 1%. They will have more black money than the 99%. The figures above are based on white money only. Those who know, say that the actual figures are far more skewed. Moreover, insiders say that the actual number of influential people making important decisions are a handful- the totality of 1% is not engineering the connivance between education and economics.

There is a plethora of data to prove the economic divide. We just skimmed the surface to provide just enough evidence to convince the reader. This means that most of us are economically exploited- while 99% people do almost all the work, the rest 1% get all the income by managing the 99%. We will investigate macroeconomics in later chapters to see how common men are deprived of their wealth without their knowledge or consent.

Thus, we reach our second conclusion that we are being exploited even though we work hard. Our economic system is corrupted.

So, does the corrupted economic system spare education? In the next section, we will see if wealth can impact our education to exploit us.

3) The Influence of Money: Now, the nature of money is to concentrate in a few hands, to gather where it is already aplenty. Money begets money. Greed brings unfair practices along with it.

How does money accumulate? Wealth does not sit idle in heaps. It paves way for more wealth by winning over people and institutions, by influencing the media and building opinions, through diplomacy, lobbying and other more unfair means like bribery, sabotage, coercion, blackmail or even elimination (murder) by employing economic hitmen.

It is the nature of wealth to affect and win over everything around it, whether by gentle means or harsh. So, how can it be negligent towards creating the required work force from the base? How can it neglect the educational system? Those who garner wealth, do it at all costs. They are not hindered by moral values. They value money above everything else, probably even above other human lives. There are rich men who are good, but they maintain their morality and do not get too far in the rat race. We are not talking about them here. We are talking about the super rich elites who actively accumulate wealth by hook or by crook.

So, we can expect wealth to affect educational policies; to dictate and even create syllabuses; to fund, create and run training programmes; to orient the management, teachers and students through such programmes and to make governments adopt teaching methods and curriculum that suit the wealthy people most.

Wealthy people and their corporations are welcome by all governments in all countries, whether the countries are democracies, theocracies or monarchies. Actually, the big corporations that run the world form coalition with governments. Together with governments, they form corporatocracies that form a strata above the much-hyped democracies (apparently) meant for the common man. The super rich owners of these corporations, or the elites form a distinct class of their own. They form a secret oligarchy that lies above the strata of corporatocracy. This oligarchy runs the world. To complete the picture, there is a fourth strata of deprived people below the three stratas of oligarchy, corporatocracy and democracy (or, whatever form of government is in vogue in a particular country). These people are war refugees, homeless people, hostages and others with practically no human or civic rights.

So, coming back to the nature of wealth, we know that it will certainly try to influence education. But, what is the proof that the educational system is really tweaked in the favour of the economic giants controlling the economic system? The finger prints of the economic system are all over the educational system. All the major flaws in the educational system worldwide correlate with the desires, the greed of the economic system. We will be discussing the defects of the educational system and how they correlate to the desire of the economic system in this book. We will see how these defects create a chasm between the theoretical and practical aspects of education, how they practically stunt the students, robbing them of the full potentiality of proper education. We will see how education is making us weak and turning us into human resources for the super rich people, instead of empowering us or providing us all-round development.

 Why am I blaming the educational system alone, when there are so many other factors involved? It is because this is the root of all other problems. Solving this problem will also solve all the other problems. Education shapes mankind, and it has immense potential. Almost all our problems are the result of our own behaviour. Sometimes we really have no choice; we cannot solve the problems in our individual capacity. However, the problems are there because the society does not think and act as a collective. If it did, all the problems would be solved. We can always change things together.

We will find out about five different pyramids of income, wealth, intelligence, information and control, later in this book. Then it will become clear that we are being manipulated subtly.

Genuine solutions always begin with the self, and extend to others. There is always an internal factor that couples with some external factors to start an interaction. If we want to change the world, we must look for the internal factors first, and change ourselves. So, we must look within and find out how we can get better as individuals. The following section focuses on the problems, the internal factors and the role of education in this.