What They Don’t Teach in Schools: The Education of Obedience, Not Freedom
- Madhukar Dama
- Apr 15
- 3 min read
Introduction: Schools were meant to prepare us for life — but instead, they prepare us to obey.
Across the globe, education is dressed up in patriotic slogans, high-tech classrooms, and “skill-based” curriculums. But underneath the glitter lies an uncomfortable truth: most schools today are not teaching children how to think — they are teaching them how to submit, conform, perform, and repeat.
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1. Schools Don’t Teach Self-Knowledge
From kindergarten to university, students are trained to answer external questions — not ask inner ones.
Who am I?
What kind of life do I truly want?
What are my values, not my marks?
These questions are seen as distractions. But without them, humans grow up directionless, depressed, or mechanical. Schools teach math and science — but not how to handle anger, grief, confusion, loneliness, or failure. They produce skilled professionals who are emotionally bankrupt and spiritually lost.
Result: A world of clever minds and hollow hearts.
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2. Schools Don’t Teach How the World Actually Works
Students graduate knowing algebra, but not:
How the banking system creates debt
How media manufactures consent
How food industries poison for profit
How politics and corporations shape our choices
Instead, schools feed sanitized versions of history and society. They glorify wars, celebrate colonizers, erase indigenous voices, and pretend the world is fair.
Result: Adults who trust systems that exploit them.
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3. Schools Don’t Teach Financial Wisdom
You can spend 15 years in school and still not know:
How to budget
How to avoid debt
How compound interest traps generations
How to live below your means
How capitalism sells illusions of success
Instead, students are trained to chase jobs, EMIs, degrees, and a lifestyle they can't sustain.
Result: A global crisis of educated slaves — working to repay, not to live.
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4. Schools Don’t Teach How to Grow Food or Fix Things
Children grow up unable to grow a tomato or mend a broken chair — but they can solve calculus problems and recite Shakespeare.
Manual skills, crafts, farming, repairs — all are seen as "low-level" or "rural." But without them, societies collapse in crisis.
Result: Hyper-dependent humans who can’t survive without corporations.
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5. Schools Don’t Teach Critical Thinking — Just Performance
Standardized testing rewards obedience and memorization.
"Good students" are often those who ask the fewest questions.
"Bad students" are often those who refuse to accept nonsense.
There is no space for healthy rebellion, moral dissent, or slow learning. Teachers are overburdened. Creativity is crushed.
Result: Intelligent children forced to behave like machines.
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6. Schools Don’t Teach True Relationships
In a world where loneliness is a pandemic, schools still don’t teach:
How to communicate without manipulation
How to listen without judgment
How to build trust and intimacy
How to spot abuse and walk away
How to heal childhood wounds
Instead, schools promote competition, popularity, and toxic hierarchies.
Result: A generation fluent in emojis, but emotionally illiterate.
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7. Schools Don’t Teach Dignity of Labour
Children are taught to “become someone” — doctor, engineer, CEO — but never to simply be.
Jobs like janitors, tailors, masons, farmers are invisible in textbooks. The obsession with “making it big” teaches shame around simplicity.
Result: A culture that values degrees over integrity, luxury over honesty.
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8. Schools Don’t Teach the Danger of Blind Ambition
No one teaches children that:
Overwork kills.
Success without peace is failure.
Fame is a trap.
Perfectionism leads to burnout.
Productivity isn't purpose.
Instead, children are fed slogans: “Be the best!” “Don’t waste time!” “Win!”
Result: A world addicted to speed, sick with stress, and disconnected from meaning.
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9. Schools Don’t Teach the Importance of Death
Death — the only guaranteed reality — is kept out of sight.
Children grow up unprepared for loss. They aren’t taught how to sit with grief, how to accept endings, or how to truly live by embracing mortality.
Result: A society in denial, endlessly chasing immortality through legacy, property, and reproduction.
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10. Schools Don’t Teach How to Say “No”
Children are rarely taught how to resist:
Peer pressure
Authority abuse
Cultural expectations
Toxic relationships
Mindless trends
Instead, they are taught to please, to obey, to conform — and to call that "discipline."
Result: Adults who don’t know their own boundaries or how to protect them.
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Conclusion: Schools Prepare Children for Systems, Not for Life
What they don't teach in schools is what truly matters:
How to think clearly
How to live ethically
How to stay mentally healthy
How to love and be free
How to say no to injustice
How to survive without being owned
A new kind of education is needed — not based on fear and control, but on truth, simplicity, self-reliance, and awareness.
Until then, schools will keep producing professionals, but not people.
Consumers, but not citizens.
Employees, but not explorers.
And humanity will keep collapsing — one educated generation at a time.
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