School, the Nation State, and the Alchemy of Power

The previous post ended with a question: how did the modern worldview (you are an individual, your problems are yours alone, trust the experts) get installed inside every person on Earth?

The answer is school.

What School Is Actually For

The standard answer to "why does school exist" is education. Knowledge. Preparing children for useful lives.

Look more carefully at what school actually does.

You are placed in a room with an authority figure. The authority talks. You absorb. You are tested on how well you can repeat back what the authority said. A grade is assigned. That grade determines your future access to opportunities.

Repeat this for sixteen years.

Notice what is entirely missing: any real experience with the thing you are supposedly learning.

The Better System We Abandoned

For most of history, learning worked through apprenticeship.

You wanted to become a doctor. You found one and worked alongside them. In the first year you did basic tasks and watched. In the second year you assisted. By the tenth year you were practicing, with a mentor who corrected your mistakes in real time.

Compare that to the modern path. Sixteen years of school, four years of university, more years of graduate training. At thirty years old you may have read thousands of pages about medicine and practiced almost none of it.

The apprentice is the better doctor. Every time.

Tests measure the wrong thing. Anyone willing to find a good teacher and put in the work can learn almost anything. That ability is not rare or special. Every human being is born with it.

The school system tells you that some people are smart enough to succeed and others are not. That is a feature of the model. Not a fact about human beings.

The school system does not find talent. It manufactures hierarchy.

The Three Societies That Invented Compulsory School

Free government-run schooling for every child is not a normal idea. Most societies in history never had it. Look at the ones that did.

Sparta. Ancient Greece had thousands of city-states. Only one had a government school system: Sparta. At age six or seven, children were taken from their parents and put into a training program called the agoge. They lived together, were given very little food, and were beaten regularly by older children. The whole point was to make them tough. Sparta was famous for one thing above everything else: its army.

The Aztecs. Before Europeans arrived in Central America, the Aztecs were the most powerful empire in the region. They also had free, compulsory schooling for every child, which almost no other ancient society had. The Aztecs were also a civilisation built entirely on war, conquest, and human sacrifice.

Prussia. This is the one that matters most to us today. Prussia, a kingdom in what is now northern Germany, introduced mandatory public schooling in the 1700s. Every other modern school system, including India's, the UK's, and the US's, is copied directly from the Prussian model. Prussia also became the most feared military force in Europe within a few generations of starting its schools.

Three societies. Three school systems. One thing in common.

War.

Compulsory schooling was not invented to educate people. It was invented to produce soldiers and people who follow orders without asking questions.

Why Children Must Be Separated From Their Parents

The separation of children from their parents is not a side effect of school. It is the mechanism.

A child with a parent present feels secure. And security is the enemy of this kind of teaching. When you feel safe, you ask questions. When you feel loved, you trust your own judgment over a stranger's.

Remove the parent, and you remove that feeling.

A five-year-old separated from their family is anxious and frightened. They need to attach to someone. The teacher is there. The teacher becomes the authority. What the teacher says becomes the truth. The child has no one else to hold on to.

You cannot brainwash a child who feels secure. The separation is the point.

Note: parents are brainwashed too. But when a child is with their parent, they feel safe enough to question, to push back, to think for themselves. Take the parent away and all of that disappears.

What Gets Installed: The Nation State

So what is being installed through all of this?

One concept. Taught through language, history, and geography. The nation state.

Before the nation state, people did not say "I am Chinese" or "I am French." They said: I am from this village, this city, this family. Those were the actual people they knew. The community they belonged to.

The nation state asks for something completely different. It asks you to feel a deep bond with millions of strangers. People you will never meet. People whose lives look nothing like yours. Just because you share a flag.

A person from Beijing and a person from rural Yunnan have almost nothing in common in daily life. The nation state says they are the same person: Chinese. And both are expected to be willing to die for that shared identity.

History, as taught in school, is the false memory of the nation state.

Not a neutral record. A story designed to make the nation state feel ancient and permanent, until a political invention starts to feel like something you owe your life to.

That is why attendance is compelled. Not because the information is valuable. Because the identity must be planted before you are old enough to ask whether you want it.

The Three Pillars

Step back and look at the full picture.

Money. The individual. The nation state.

They feel natural. They feel like they have always been there. But none of them existed for most of human history. You cannot reason your way to any of them from scratch. You have to be taught to believe them before you are old enough to ask why.

A person from five hundred years ago, hearing these concepts explained, would reach one conclusion: everyone in this world is a slave. Working for tokens created from nothing. Blaming themselves for problems built into the system. Willing to die for an imaginary entity invented to serve whoever sits at the top.

This is how power works. It turns nothing into everything.

Where did these three ideas come from? What single revolution in human thinking made all of them possible?

The answer is monotheism, the belief in one God, one truth, one reality above all others. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not three separate religions. They are three versions of the same idea. And that idea is the engine behind money, the individual, and the nation state.

That is the thread that runs through the rest of this series.

Power Is Alchemy

For centuries, alchemists had one goal: turn lead into gold. Nothing into everything.

Science dismissed this as fantasy.

Science was wrong.

Alchemy succeeded. We just stopped calling it that.

Money is lead turned into gold. A number in a ledger, made into something people spend their whole lives chasing, lying for, killing for, dying for. The individual is the same. The nation state is the same. All three are stories. All three became real because people were taught to believe in them.

Power is the ability to turn nothing into everything. That is the definition. That is what it has always been.

We live extremely miserable lives. Not from material poverty, but because the stories running the system go against everything human beings actually need.

Not a Conspiracy, But an Accident

Here is the one thing that complicates everything, and also makes it hopeful.

No one designed this.

There was no meeting of powerful people who decided to create money, invent the individual, and manufacture the nation state as tools of control. The system grew from thousands of years of small decisions, accidents, and unintended results, made by people just trying to solve the problem in front of them.

The prison was built by people who did not know they were building a prison.

This matters. It means the system is not inevitable. It is not run by some unstoppable evil force. It is a product of human imagination, but imagination that had no idea what it was building.

And what imagination built without awareness, it can rebuild with awareness.

Kant said reality is what we imagine it to be. That is also a description of an opening.

Money, the individual, the nation state: all of these became real because enough people believed in them. That means they can change. The only question is whether we can change what we believe.

The Greeks called what that looks like: eudaimonia. Not pleasure. Not comfort. The full expression of human capacity, living excellently, thinking boldly, contributing to something beyond yourself.

That world is not a utopia. It is a choice.

The rest of this series is about understanding what we built, how we built it, and whether we can imagine something better.