There are so many striking similarities between schools and hospitals, between our “educational” system and our “healthcare” systems. Both are the result of radical, government-granted monopoly. Both create dependency. You cannot think for yourself, you cannot even decide what to think ABOUT – State-licensed teachers will do it for you. You cannot take care of your own body – State-licensed medical specialists will do it for you. That’s the message these two institutions send by their very existence. Both institutions remove from the home the activities that have been done in home for centuries and place them in the institutions. No longer people are born, learn the skills they need to deal with life, and die in home, surrounded by and care for by the loved ones. Instead, they are born in hospitals, where their mothers are “rescued from the perils of childbirth” by licensed strangers. They are educated and “socialized” in schools by licensed teachers. When they fall gravely ill, they are urged to go to the hospital in what is often futile attempt to prolong life at any cost, even at the cost of prolonging suffering and misery. When they die, the funeral cartel makes a handsome some of money on the burial. Both schools and hospitals are instruments of control. It’s much easier to control people in institutions then in their own homes. According to John Gatto, “the first function of schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority.” It’s not about education, it’s about control. And when women are urged to avoid the risks of having a baby at home and to go have a baby in a hospital instead, it’s not, as your obstetrician would want you to believe, about “safety”. A hospital birth sends a message to the new mother: “you are incompetent. You cannot do it without us, the specialists – so shut up and be grateful!” These two systems support and reinforce each other. A mother who is lead to believe that she is not competent to give birth without specialists is more likely to believe that she is not competent to educate her child, either. And a woman who had gone through a twelve-year long obedience training camp is more likely to accept the orders of an authoritarian obstetrician. Should she decide to rebel and to have a baby at home, the people closest to her, themselves graduates of the twelve-years obedience camp, might be horrified by her decision and offer her no support. Yet this vicious cycle of dependency on the institutions can be broken. Every time a baby is born at home, or educated at home, it chips away a bit of the base on which the unholy edifice of power rests. Homebirthing moms and home educating parents are the revolutionaries of our times. [This is the second installment of year in review, where Ill be reposting stuff I have written earlier in the remaining days of 2014...]
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 18:00:01 +0000
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