ExploreTruth

I was watching this teaser for a documentary on America’s educational system. It’s begins with this quote:

Schools should be like factories, in which raw products, children, are
to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like
nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from
government and industry. – Elwood Cubberly, Dean of Education at Stanford (1905)

The name of the documentary is “The 4th Purpose” and it discusses the intent and impact of American public schooling. It’s planned to be a 3 episode, 6 hour film.  The full 15 minute demo reel clip can be found here

From what I watched so far, it seems a bit overly sensational, but also interesting and provokative at the same time.  But while I was watching, a phrase jumped out of me:

Sit Down And Shut Up

It summed up, with a slogan, all that our educational system at its worst, systematically represents and is telling its “products” or students to do.  I haven’t gotten my hands on the full length documentary to evaluate the complete case they are making.  I can only speak to what many generally accept to be a system very far from perfection.  However, this film seems to go further and suggest a historic, and organized intention to keep the educational system in a perpetual inferior state.  Anyhooo…that’s another topic for another day.

Stumbling across this video got me thinking of the other systems that speak the same language.  Those in seats of power, whether they are perched in educational board rooms, high in ivory towers, white houses, or corporate banking meetings, seem at times to be saying the same thing.

Sit Down, And Shut Up.

I guess history tells us this is not new.

I imagine it’s what the the Africans heard for hundreds of years in the heat of Africa’s apartheid sun.

It may be what the Caribbean and North American Slaves heard, some now buried in unmarked graves beneath the same earth they once trod, bent over, and with hands to their masters sugar cane or cotton.

Later it is what an oppressed people heard upon finally awakening with the courage to rebel against the idea of racial inequality expressed in a Jim Crow, segregated existence.

And today it is even what we all may hear, every time we close our eyes to the inconvenient truths of today or outsource our thinking to a compromised news media, heavily influenced political system, or a half blind religious institution who has forgotten its prophetic role in a real and suffering world.

Maybe it’s what we are listening to, every time we succumb to societies pressure to be just a little more like everyone else, and in so doing forgetting our unique calling, or purpose.

Every time we acquiesce to the fears that keep us from being all that we were meant to be, we become silent participators in the grand conspiracy of mediocrity.   Aiders and abettors in the crime of a wasteful life.  A slap in the face to the ancestors who didn’t have the freedoms afforded us today, and yet we reach even higher, to the face and ears of a Creator, with the words of:

“Thank you for making me average….I appreciate it…sort of…”