The Perpetuation of Slavery Through Public School Education
– 11 min read
By: Neb Nehez Meniooh
Educating our children is one of the most important components of cultural survival. Our children are our progression into the future. They are our only chance at immortality and the perpetuation of our names, bloodlines and values. African society is well known for the respect it gives children. This respect does not equate to granting freedom or authority to children, but instead maintaining a clear awareness that today’s child will be tomorrow’s leader. A child must be treated as a capable entity that is expected to learn, submit to and take responsibility for the natural Divine Order.
According to the initiatic wisdom of the Holy Drama (humanity’s original spiritual text) the first human beings were Divine in nature as they were creators of the cycle of life and death to which we now find ourselves a part. Their existence gives us a chance to participate in life. Their Divine example provides us, their descendants, with perfect guidance on how to navigate our own world. Their model, as it has been preserved among the various Ancestral cultures of the planet, serves as our most sacred form of education.
Within the oldest documented accounts of their story, the God Wsr (Osiris), our Ancestral Father, when given the choice of how to live out his immortality, was clear: to die, transcend and reincarnate through his descendants. He passed his life on in order to experience his immortality. On the other hand, his brother the God Seth (Typhon) made a choice that expresses a much more aggressive personality: to keep his life, power and heritage all for himself. He will never die, never grow old and never produce offspring. His ambitions lead him to constantly look towards acquiring more territory for himself and, in (perfectly) doing so, he attempts to conquer his brother’s share of the heritage of Earth, which they were both granted. In the Holy Drama, Seth kills his brother with this aim, and the Goddess Aishat is left with the charge of raising Wsr’s unborn son, the God Heru. With assistance from her sisters/co-spouses, she educates Heru and protects him from Seth’s conspiring traps until he is able to defend himself and fulfill his mission: to restore the Ancestral legacy of his father.
As with all authentic spiritual texts, the message and guidance in the Holy Drama does not expire. Today, if we are lackadaisical in the education and exposure of our children, Seth will strike hard in order to recruit them. He will attempt to misdirect and deter them from fighting for and protecting the territory of their Ancestral Father. Every human being born of a mother and father can be likened to Heru. So in our case, the territory we are fighting to reestablish is represented by the preservation of life, the perpetuation of the human species and our ability to harmonise with nature. We can see this common thread running through and connecting many of the world’s “indigenous” or Ancestral cultures.
Long ago, our Ancestors knew that the education of children was an ongoing, never-ending procedure. From the frequency of the mother’s nursing to the rhythms in her walk while the baby is carried on her back, a baby learns how to interact with the natural world around it. As the child grows, its environment must instill a clear understanding of its identity and what strengths and weaknesses come with that identity. It will have to be educated on its mission in life and what responsibilities and obligations that mission bestows. Consequently, the child can set its priorities accordingly, investing its energy into becoming a useful component of a greater whole. Each family will be responsible for uniquely educating its youth with the aspects of the family’s identity, history and position. However, amongst our differences we all share glaring similarities as we are a part of the same species sharing the same planet. This dynamic will lead to the construction of each individual.
If Seth succeeds in conquering the heart and mind of the child, that child will grow into the world seeing the assassin of its father as its saviour and the legacy of its father as a shameful history from which it must distance itself. It will therefore view its father’s dignified descendants as its enemies who should be either “civilised” or destroyed.
Our current world is proof of Seth’s strength and dynamism; a world that has agreed that Africa is humanity’s homeland while simultaneously acting on the perception that it is primitive or backwards. Our current system has led Africa’s descendants to try to suck it of resources and its people of their wealth. But, let us always remember that Seth’s choice has left him with no descendants, therefore, he is neither loyal nor obliged to anyone. Instead, he is always ready to use everyone to achieve his aim of accumulating more wealth and power while destroying his brother’s legacy.
The pages of human history have documented the enslavement of the descendants of Wsr and their disconnection from the Ancestral legacy that was preserved by the Kemetic temples. In Maanu (the Americas), these men and women were forced into labour by European settlers who fled their most recent “homeland” to escape the political oppression and religious persecution of the Christian Knights. (Check RF68 Earth Talk for history of European subjugation). The English pilgrims were themselves disconnected from their Ancestral legacy in Africa long before. Their homeland had been the incubator for the war-driven culture now dominating the planet. In fleeing Europe’s barbaric social climate, they sought to find a place where they could better teach their children their own values. However, one does not solve a problem of an extinguished fire on the stove by carrying a leaky pot to be placed on another burner. Those values led the settlers to perpetrate the same evils they fled. They not only violently forced labour upon the native populations that received them but also educated their own children to be the next generation of perpetrators and victims of this global tyranny.
In 1607, the first English settlement, Jamestown, was established by the London Company. In the following years, many other English colonies were established along the Atlantic coast with the goal of conquering the region. Those initial settlers endured severe illness cutting their population in less than half. About twenty-five years after settlement, small private community schools were started like the Boston Latin School. They also began enslaving some of the natives of the area, even trading them with enslaved men brought over from Meritah. For the rest of the native population of the area, missions teaching European values and religion were sent out in order to “civilise”. For the majority of the settler population in Maanu, each family handled education, and this was the common trend until around the 1800s. These early settlers who were teaching their own children at home achieved a 99% literacy rate, according to Jefferson’s Education Study.
However, with the turn of the 19th century, the school system of America began taking shape. In 1821, the first public high school was created, and in 1822, the first government-run teacher’s college was created called The First Public Normal School located in Lexington Green, Massachusetts. Though seemingly an innocent method of organizing public education, The First Normal School was a huge step towards the modern public school system. For the first time, the government now trained teachers uniformly and by doing so could manipulate the direction in which they guided the children (future) of the state. As James G. Carter, a Massachusetts state legislator who was instrumental in founding the Normal School said,
A state controlled teacher’s college can be an engine to sway the public sentiment, the public morals, and the public religion more powerful than any other in the possession of government.
In 1837, Horace Mann led the first State Board of Education in Massachusetts. Six years into the position, he traveled to Prussia, Germany where he investigated a new form of compulsory schooling. The Prussian Educational system was a state-sponsored compulsory schooling engineered by King Frederick William I in 1717. It was initiated as a means of solidifying the inexperienced Prussian military state into a uniform whole. After him, his son and grandson advanced his model for the purpose of consolidating imperial power.
This Prussian model was not the first public school. However, throughout Europe’s history, schooling, just like religion, was used more so as a weapon of the dominating political powers rather than for the enlightenment or evolution of the individual. During the Protestant Reformation, amongst confusing arguments of separating the two political arms of church and state, schooling was being used to impose the Lutheran doctrine. Looking even further back, the earliest documented educational system was that of Sparta. There, the state was organised as one vast military camp and children were seized by the state and educated in barracks to the ideal of state obedience.
Prussia had just re-implemented those models, but in a way that more closely resembles the American school system. In Prussia, children between ages 7-14 were forced to attend school, and uncooperative parents were fined or their children were removed from their care. For the first time, high school graduation examinations were necessary to enter the learned professions and the civil service. As Thomas Alexander expressed in 1918, in his history study of Prussian Educational system:
The Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is, to a large measure, enslaved through the medium of his school; that his learning, instead of making him his own master, forges the chain by which he is held in servitude; that the whole scheme of the Prussian elementary school education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-nine out of every one hundred citizens subservient… The elementary schools of Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes.
After Mann’s return, this became popular very fast in the USA. The nineteenth century was a time of mass production following the Industrial Revolution where more and more workers were needed. This new system would not only educate young men to be obedient workers in this new economy, but to also be subservient enough to become soldiers and kill for the state when the time called for it. The educational institution was built with this aim.
The US Department of Education was formed in 1867. Influenced by the Prussian model and implementing the psychological findings of the time, schools now became age segregated, peer and grade based. Following theories of Charles Darwin and Edward Thorndike, schools implemented more and more habit training exercises under the idea that individuals who could think for themselves would “spoil the harmony of the collective society that was coming” (John Dewey). Anyone who has been in the modern education system can see that Ivan Pavlov’s bell experiments used on the salivating dog even found its place separating class subjects. Students were trained to move from one class to the next by conditioned reflex. A clear agenda of mind control had been defined.
In the “new world” the children of the settlers were surrendered for totalitarianism, while the education of the enslaved African was severely handicapped due to enslaved labour from sunrise to sunset. The outlawing of traditional African languages and music on plantations also disrupted the ability of those enslaved to properly educate their children. Their enslavement was seen as already guaranteed so their education into the mental slavery of the nation was unnecessary and even blocked. But the children of the enslaved natives were still participating in their Ancestral structures of education and this posed a threat.
In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was established by US Army Officer Richard Henry Pratt. Officer Pratt, after kidnapping “Indian” youth, cut the hair of young Indians, and forced them to learn English, gave them English names, forced their conversion to Christianity and subjected them to military protocols. He ordered, “Let all that is Indian within you die.” His students (prisoners) were used in experiments to intimidate and pacify other Natives as well as being workers in society. His form of “Indian Schooling” (kidnapping and indoctrination) would continue until the 1980s, but he provided the model for boarding schools and schools on Indian reservations that solely taught European education. This is not only still alive and well today in 2015, but it is making its way around the world.
At the end of the 1800s, with a growing population excited to enjoy the spoils of a war waged on its own species, the families who had become rich from the slave trade and the industrial boom considered further possibilities of fortifying their new system through public education. As New York public school teacher, John Taylor Gatto, exposed in his book Dumbing Us Down, “Through education, people’s lives could be engineered like an assembly line so they would work like homogenous robots with the machines” of the industrial age. After more meetings with psychologists, behaviorists and “educators” with the aim of refining the system started in 1843 “[removing] the intellectual process so that human beings are a lump of plastic that can be molded,” a group of industrial titans like Rockefeller and Carnegie came together to finance the perfect education system (which is still functioning today). In the words of the Rockefeller General Education Board (1906) ”In our dreams… people yield themselves with perfect docility into our molding hands.”
Before judging these men and women, it will be more constructive to realise that they were not much different from you or me or any humans who have walked our planet. These men were interested in bettering this world. More specifically, and as a result of their own education, they were dedicated to ensuring their families would grow their wealth at a faster rate than any other on the planet. Their exposure came from those who received them at birth and somewhere in their upbringing, the wealth of the elite outweighed the importance of the mental health, stability and destiny of the human beings that made up their nation.
In 1960, the plan and creation of these men had been finalised and implemented. Since then, even the aim of effectively indoctrinating children with European language and values is questionable, as America has watched graduation and literacy rates decline in the decades that followed.
Further refinement with the implementation of a process called tracking now utilises statistics to assess through school standardised tests and placement tests which percentage of kids in school will populate the executive, management, factory worker, labour and prisoner levels of society. Yes, prisoner levels too! “School-to-prison pipeline” statistics connecting reading levels, high school dropout rates and incarceration rates gives the analytical mind resources with which to project their business plans. We can observe that as America’s prison industrial complex becomes more and more profitable to our leaders and overseas labour becomes cheaper and more popular, prisons and soldiers are the hot commodities needed from the American education system.
Parents must question the idea of “blindly trusting [the care of] your child to a collection of untested strangers and hoping for the best” as Gatto (who was one of those strangers for over 30 years) states. The public school system can do nothing to instill your Ancestral values into your children. Though that may clearly be the parent’s job, are most doing so?
According to the National Home Education Institute, American children on average spend thirty-six to fifty-four hours in school related activities per week. Considering that fifty-six hours of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week their child sleeps and the thirty hours the average child spends in front of the television, most parents are left with just twenty-eight hours each week (four hours a day) to influence their child. If we consider that the parent is housing them, feeding them, and getting them to and from their school, doctor and extracurricular activities, the glaring reality is that they are birthing children that the system then steals away.
A consequence of Wsr’s choice to have descendants was that He is now obliged to support life and positively affect his environment so that he can leave a better world to his offspring. Seth, on the other hand, has chosen to be everlasting. He doesn’t need to pass on his legacy to anyone and therefore only uses his environment to further his gain. He is not worried about being killed because he knows he is going nowhere else. He is dynamic. He knows that the more space he gains, the greater his power will be, a power he will never have to fully abandon. He has done a good job in educating (recruiting) the descendants of those he assassinated. Today, parents of all colours see the public education system as their saviour. They depend on it, second-guessing the education that they inherited from their Ancestors. They question how an education they, themselves, or their family members could impart on their own children can measure up to the compulsory schooling of today.
In an upcoming issue, we will review some of the alternatives to compulsory schooling of colonial public schools and present some important things to remember in an education supporting our future.
