Schools encourage intellectual dependency towards authority by discouraging inquiry
By discouraging and punishing inquiry, schools encourage authority bias in their students. It leads them to believe in authority as the ultimate source of unquestionable truth and that they must wait for other people, more qualified than themselves, to make the meanings of their lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only the teacher can determine what kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay them can make those decisions, which they then enforce. And of the millions of things of value to study, governments decide what few they have time for. If teachers are told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, they must transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what has been told of them to think, even if the authority makes an incorrect statement. This power to control what students will think allows teachers to separate successful students from failures very easily. Successful students do the thinking that is assigned of them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. it’s not about truth, it’s about obedience, and truth is only valuable insofar as it fosters obedience. indeed, a far better test of intellectual dependency is to get students to believe anything that an authority says even if it’s totally stupid.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent. Many industries would collapse unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.
References
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Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 1. The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher (p. 24). Gabriola Island, CA: New Society Publishers.
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LIbertarian Communist Platform. (2014). Education For Obedience (10:18). Youtube.