the teachings of schools

A little bit of enlightening truth from my first class (Critical Thinking) towards my Equine Sciences degree:

In 1906, William Graham Sumner published a land-breaking study of the foundations of sociology and anthropology, Folkways, in which he documented the tendency of the human mind to think sociocentrically and the parallel tendency for schools to serve the (uncritical) function of social indoctrination :
“Schools make persons all on one pattern, orthodoxy. School education, unless it is
regulated by the best knowledge and good sense, will produce men and women who
are all of one pattern, as if turned in a lathe…An orthodoxy is produced in regard to all
the great doctrines of life. It consists of the most worn and commonplace opinions which
are common in the masses. The popular opinions always contain broad fallacies, halftruths,
and glib generalizations (p. 630).”

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