The best vehicle for implementing and maintaining control is the socio-cultural factor called education - and which, from the veiwpoint of the really powerful, can be designed to consist of anything and everything except real knowledge regarding ways and means of empowerment.

It is a given that a fairly high percentage of all people eagerly subscribe to and take advantage of societally approved education if it is made availible to them.

But behind-the-scenes of this enthusiasm, it is to be wondered who decide what societally approved education is to consist of.

This deciding includes:

What textbooks are to be designed and published;

How histories are to be written according to which slant;

What is considered appropriate to philosophical, scientific, and sociological teachings;

And,as well, what is to be educated toward and what is, so to speak, to be de-educated away from.

In his book, The Anatomy of Power, John Kenneth Galbraith all too briefly discusses the necessity of social conditioning with regard to educationally formating the masses so as to establish among them a broad consensus acceptance of organized power structures.

He observes that the conditioning has two faces, one having to do with what the masses need to be educated toward, and and second what they need to be educated away from. Beyond that observation, Galbraith then leaves it to the imagination of the reader what the two faces more deeply consist of.

Obviously, the social conditioning leads toward installing acceptance of power and the powerful - and leads away from installing knowledge about power and empowerment, and about depowerment as well.

It is not too much to say, then, that societally approved educational formats will contain vacuum of knowledge regarding anything that explicitly or implicitly might have to do with empowerment and depowerment. Indeed, omitting certain factors from the overall human knowledge pool is clearly one excellent way of keeping them invisible and inaccessible.

But WHAT is efficiently to be omitted is certainly understood by societal power structures. Otherwise, how could anyone know what to omit?

It is thus possible that the web of secrets preventing access to knowledge of empowerment is subtly implemented via the deliberately selected parameters of societally approved education.

By far and large, humans usually and unquestionably assume the authenticity and truth regarding education downloading from approved societal power sources.

Whatever they have NOT learned via such sources will be considered as unreal to them - and they will castigate it as such.

This means that if the officially educated of a given power structure have not learned of the existence of empowerment and depowerment processes, then they, themselves, will be of tremendous assistance in denying the possibility of such processes.

Thus, efforts to keep the powerless in conditions of depowerment are rather exquisitely designed.

-- 8ball (side@pocket.com), April 08, 2001