It is the defining feature of ministries to promise one thing and deliver its opposite. The Ministry of Education promises freedom through knowledge while delivering bondage through ignorance.

Formal education is where curiosity,  enthusiasm and joie de vivre go to die. It’s where youth grows old, where supple and dynamic spirit gets calcified and petrified, and where childhood in its positive aspect is converted to adulthood in its negative aspect. 

Of course, you don’t need higher education to become rigidly herdbound; a few years of lower education is more than adequate. One way or another, today’s herd begets tomorrow’s.

The only real education you can have is that which you claw out for yourself through the trailblazing of original thought. Mortimer Adler changed the common phrase “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic” to “reading, writing and reckoning”, a significant improvement that rejects memorization and embraces thought. It’s the difference between eating rotten fish from a communal bucket and learning to fish for yourself. Learning to read will teach you to write, and learning to write will teach you to reckon. Reckoning — thinking — is the royal road to everything you’re looking for. 

The only goal of learning for the serious person is to answer the question, Who, what and where am I? Until that question is answered or otherwise destroyed, there can be no other topic of interest. For the unserious person, this question has been trampled in the mud beneath the billions of hooves, so that displaying any interest in understanding yourself will subject you to scorn and mockery; what Alan Watts called the taboo against knowing who you are.

That’s what you’re up against if you wish to inquire into your situation. If you don’t, if you are content with not knowing who and what and where you are, then in what sense are you any better than a mindless sheep? In what sense are you alive? As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. The Ministry of Education teaches us to accept, not to examine; to believe, not to think; to trust, not to question; to abdicate self-sovereignty, not to cherish it above life itself. The true purpose of the education system is not to liberate us like angels, but to break us like livestock.

As Thoreau wrote in Walden:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. 

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates; a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. 

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. 

The Ministry of Education can’t take all the credit, but it’s a big part of the machine that grinds people into sausage.