Higher education reinforces obedience to authority rather than independent thought.
Evidence
It surprised and shocked me to sit in classes where professors were not excited about teaching, where they did not seem to have a clue that education was about the practice of freedom. During college, the primary lesson was reinforced: we were to learn obedience to authority.
In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility.
— bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 17
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 359; Controlling a person’s thinking through education can substitute for coercion. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 867; Schooling can be engineered to train attention for exploitation rather than liberation. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 292 (+13 more)
Broader Connections
- College education durably lowers authoritarianism for most students
#contradicts(0.92) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1136 - University education lowers authoritarianism, most among high scorers
#contradicts(0.90) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1109 - Public university education reduces authoritarianism through exposure to diversity
#contradicts(0.90) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3832 - Parenthood raises authoritarianism while higher education lowers it
#contradicts(0.90) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1186 - Modern schooling creates an individuality that only exists in the act of obedience
#corroborates(0.88) - Professors are often more enthralled by classroom power than by enlightenment
#corroborates(0.83) - Disciplinary power produces individuals rather than suppressing them.
#corroborates(0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 264 - Schooling can be engineered to train attention for exploitation rather than liberation.
#expands(0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 292 - Academic institutions structurally reward conventional teaching and punish engaged pedagogy
#corroborates(0.80) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 403 - Disciplinary schooling values the act of keeping position more than the position itself
#expands(0.79) - Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation.
#corroborates(0.78) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 359 - Education becomes liberatory only when students co-labor in knowledge, not consume it
#qualifies(0.77) - Controlling a person’s thinking through education can substitute for coercion.
#expands(0.76) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 867 - Oppressors use education to change the oppressed’s consciousness rather than their situation.
#exemplifies(0.74) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 211 - Authority rests on learned competence within a division of labor, not grace
#complicates(0.73) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 217