Freeing Our Children’s Minds from Formal Education
(Full text)

Last night I was watching the film *Armageddon Time*, which was nominated at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for Best Screenplay, the Jury Prize and Best Actor, although it ultimately won none of these awards. In my view, however, it is a film worth seeing.

The central narrative of the film is the ruthless intrusion of the world and the educational system into children’s lives in order to erase their independent and unique identities: a world never protected from the cruelty of politics, ideologies and the prejudices of the adult world, and the responsibility and possibility we have to protect the flame of our children’s individuality.

After the film ended, before going to sleep, I looked at my Twitter timeline and saw the painting above, shared by a good friend. The painting is titled *Compulsory Education*. The artist who created it around 1890 was Rivière Breton, and this beautiful work is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia.

This striking coincidence led me to write these few lines. The beauty of art has always been that it speaks to us without mediation. The gaze of this little girl, and the tension between her desire to connect with life and nature and its confrontation with compulsory education, speaks to a lost part of the feelings of all of us—something we recognise bitterly, understand deeply and remember.

Children are naturally and innately thirsty for learning and enter this world with a deep, instinctive desire to learn. In my view, one of the greatest functions of compulsory education is to kill and destroy this natural desire for learning.

The task of the educational system in its present form is not to cultivate children who rely on their own talents, love learning and develop their individuality. Its task is to turn children into the small and large, uniform and ultimately identical cogs of a great machine called society.

All the beliefs, prejudices, judgements and preconceptions of tradition and ideology that have contaminated the mental world of adults must be embodied within compulsory education, so that children become not independent thinkers but manageable products who sustain the survival of the system of thought that created and enslaved them.

The first task of formal education is to guarantee that children do not think independently. The teachers desired by such a system must be as small as the content they are required to teach, and the task of the educational organisation is to exercise a form of power through which obedience to the command not to think is learned and accepted from the beginning, until we ourselves come to fear thought and regard anyone who begins to think as an enemy.

No despotism can survive without people and a society prepared to accept it, and compulsory education has the task of ensuring that acceptance.
In *Armageddon Time*, the grandfather of the young protagonist, played by Anthony Hopkins, is the source of inspiration and independent thought for a child who continually finds himself rebelling against a world that imposes its desires and beliefs upon him at home and at school.

Tomorrow’s world will not resemble yesterday’s if we actively encourage our children to think and not surrender their individuality, and if we refuse, through our indifference and silence, to become the institutions that reproduce despotism inside our own homes.

True education teaches children how to think, not what to think. Such education does not see children’s minds as vessels to be filled with content desired by structures of power, but as candles to be lit so that they may illuminate through their own inner capacities and strength.

Aydin Areta