Claims about the design of modern schooling may be debated in the details, but the outcomes are easier to recognize: a population trained early to accept external authority, to seek approval, and to fear standing apart.

Experiments like Solomon Asch’s conformity studies and Stanley Milgram’s obedience research are often discussed as if they reveal a flaw in “human nature” alone. But I can’t help wondering how much of that obedience is cultivated—how much is rehearsed through years of compulsory attendance, where the central lesson is not merely reading and math, but compliance, ranking, and dependency.

Compulsory schooling—especially when it begins at very young ages—places a child in a social world where even loving parents have limited influence. The institution becomes the constant. The schedule becomes the law. The teacher becomes the official authority.

A child learns, early, that:

• You are evaluated continuously.
• You are rewarded for conformity and punished for disruption.
• You are trained to avoid mistakes not through exploration, but through fear of correction.
• You learn from your classmates’ embarrassment as much as from your own.

This is not an education in thinking. It is an education in fitting.

Daily work normalizes routine—bells, lines, permissions, standardized tasks—preparing a person for later systems that demand the same pattern. In place of open-ended questions and the cultivation of judgment, imagination is often traded for multiple-choice certainty.

And then comes the deeper programming: civic ritual without civic maturity.

The daily pledge can be a beautiful promise when it emerges from understanding. But when it is drilled into children who cannot yet think critically about power, it can slide into unexamined loyalty—especially when coupled with cultural glorification of war and “heroes,” and an assumption that dissent is disloyal.

The grading system does more than measure performance—it shapes identity.

A number becomes a verdict. A letter becomes a label.

When the end result is treated as the proof of one’s worth, the mind shifts away from growth and toward status: How do I look? Where do I rank? Will I fail publicly?

In that environment, curiosity becomes risky. Creativity becomes inconvenient. Learning becomes a transaction.

Motivation psychology has long warned about this: when you take something naturally meaningful and turn it into a requirement, you often shrink the intrinsic drive behind it. This is the undermining (or overjustification) effect in plain view—children learn to work for approval rather than understanding.

There’s a widely-cited creativity finding—often repeated as a “NASA study,” popularized through later research and commentary—that roughly argues this: young children overwhelmingly show the traits associated with creative problem-solving, but only a small percentage retain those traits by adulthood.

Whether or not every statistic is quoted perfectly, the direction of the claim rings familiar: the longer a person sits inside a rigid system, the more that natural brilliance gets narrowed into safe answers.

Historically, Horace Mann admired the efficiency of Prussian-style mass education and helped champion a similar model in the United States. In Gatto’s telling, the “why” behind this was not primarily to raise free, independent thinkers, but to stabilize society: to produce predictability in an age of industrialization, urban growth, and social change.

The “how” is not mysterious:

• compulsory attendance
• age-graded classrooms
• standardized curriculum
• bell-regulated schedules
• an emphasis on obedience, repetition, and hierarchy

If you want disciplined factory workers and compliant citizens, this architecture makes sense.

Of course, experiences differ from person to person. Some teachers are saints. Some schools nurture real thought.

But overall—based on what I’ve observed—the system’s broad effects have been effective at producing what it was built to produce: people trained to follow rules, seek status, and distrust their own authority.

Fear-based political news can function like a threat-maintenance loop.

It keeps attention locked onto danger. That keeps the body in stress mode. Stress mode impairs working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility—exactly the mental tools required to make balanced decisions.

When people can’t think clearly, they reach for certainty. They become impulsive, reactive, tribal, and easier to steer.

Then the discomfort drives them back to more fear-content for “updates” and relief. And over time, the loop becomes self-reinforcing.

In that state, what are the chances someone will calmly consider a hard possibility—like this one:

We the people are going nowhere if each party exists mainly to reverse the previous party’s progress, while powerful insiders are protected across administrations.

A population trained for obedience and maintained in fear is not a population prepared for accountability.

To keep believing that either party is devoted to your well-being—your life, your dignity, your relief from suffering—requires a level of denial that borders on clinically recognizable blindness to one’s own condition.

And history gives plenty of reasons to distrust unaccountable power.

Not rumors—documented patterns:

• land taken through force and policy, then repackaged as destiny
• slavery and its long afterlife, defended with “morality” only when politically convenient
• unethical government-backed experiments and abuses carried out on the poor, prisoners, minorities, the disabled, and the sick—often under medical cover
• propaganda and public manipulation that did not begin in the modern era, and did not end with any single country

This doesn’t prove every modern suspicion. But it does establish a sober rule:

Power has a record, and the record should shape our skepticism.

The word conspiracy is one of many labels used like a spell: say it, and the speaker is dismissed.

But “conspiracy” simply means coordinated action in secret. It does not automatically mean “crazy.” It does not automatically mean “false.”

At the same time, suspicion without evidence can become its own cage.

So the standard must be simple and ruthless:

• demand transparency
• follow documented incentives
• trace who benefits
• insist on verifiable proof
• refuse tribal allegiance when reality contradicts your side

And while we’re at it: “woke” is not the same as enlightened. Awareness without humility can become another costume for superiority.

Hold those in power accountable for the horrors they commit.

Not with slogans.
Not with team colors.
Not with fear-addiction.

Think for yourself.
Question authority.
With attention.
With documentation.
With moral courage.

Because a people trained to obey—and kept anxious enough to stay distracted—will always be ruled by those least worthy of trust.

And that is exactly why the first act of freedom is to reclaim the mind.

The cost of comfort is obedience. The price of freedom is attention.