The Combantant Body & A Prisoner of the Assumptions and Dogmas.

a few weeks ago, when Qiaos learnt from a little bird that i was facing difficulties in school and life here, he dropped me two notes of encouragement via email. in his latter email, he remarked on institutional processes:

The greatest lesson I learnt from being in London was that societies are constructed differently to yield different kinds of people, who will perpetuate their societies in some ways. I tried to convey some of this in my Western architecture history class, but I felt that it was dimly understood: the combatant body that underlines a society like Australia's is very alien to Singapore in some ways. This is perhaps one of the reasons why dislocation can be so traumatic.

this got me digging for a very old transcription i received from my good friend Rhao some 8 years ago, which i feel is worth some critical contemplation.

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave--that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed--yet it is a powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

[...]

(...) Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been abale to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourselves--educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

Lessing, Doris. Intro to The Golden Notebook. (1971)