What If Everything You Learned in School Was Designed to Stop You Thinking?

A mildly uncomfortable question that Plato asked first, and nobody has answered satisfactorily since

Let me begin with a small confession. I was an excellent student. I learned to give the right answers quickly, to work out what the teacher wanted, and to deliver it with enough apparent confidence that nobody looked too hard at whether I had actually thought about any of it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that these two skills of being good at school and of being good at thinking are not only different, but are sometimes, quietly, at war with each other.

Plato noticed this roughly 2,400 years ago. He was not polite about it.

Are we taught t only consuming knowledge, rather than generating it?

The Cave, the Classroom, and the Uncomfortable Parallel

You may have encountered Plato's Allegory of the Cave at some point. Prisoners chained in a cave since birth, facing a wall, watching shadows cast by objects they cannot see, and taking those shadows to be the whole of reality. When one prisoner is freed and dragged into the sunlight, the experience is not pleasant. The light is blinding. The real objects are disorienting. The freed prisoner, if they return to the cave, is mocked by the others who never left.

The allegory is usually taught as being about philosophy and truth. Which it is. But sit with it for a moment and ask yourself: what does the cave look like in practice? What institution places people in rows, facing the same direction, and feeds them a pre-selected version of reality that someone else has decided they should receive?

The cave doesn't have to have chains. It can have timetables, gold stars, and a very reassuring bell that tells you when thinking time is over.

I am not suggesting that teachers are villains in this story. Most of the teachers I have known went into the profession precisely because they loved ideas and wanted to share that love.

The problem is not the people. It is the structure. And the structure, Plato would argue, is doing something very specific: it is producing people who are good at consuming knowledge, not at generating it.

What Schools Actually Reward

Think about what got you marks. Not what made you curious. Not what kept you up at night turning a question over. What got you marks.

The correct answer, stated clearly, within the time limit, in the expected format, without going off on interesting tangents that the mark scheme hadn't anticipated.

Now think about what genuine philosophical thinking actually looks like. It looks like Socrates in the Agora, wandering around asking people questions they hadn't expected, following the argument wherever it went, arriving at conclusions that were inconvenient for everyone involved, including himself. It looks like staying with a problem long after the bell has rung. It looks like saying, "I don't know", as a starting point rather than a failure.

None of that is on the grading scheme.

Socrates, it is worth remembering, was not given an A-star. He was given hemlock.

The Aha Moment Nobody Tells You About

Here is the thing that nobody tells you when you're sitting in a classroom being told what the French Revolution was caused by: there is a completely different kind of knowing available to you, and school is mostly not teaching it.

The kind of knowing school teaches is propositional. It is knowing that The Battle of Hastings was in 1066. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Photosynthesis involves chlorophyll. These are things you know that.

The kind of knowing Plato was interested in, and the kind that actually changes how you move through the world, is something closer to knowing how and knowing why. Not just what the answer is, but why it is the answer. Not just what happened, but what it means that it happened. Not just the fact, but the questions the fact opens up.

Knowing that Descartes said,"I think, therefore I am", is school knowledge. Sitting with what it would mean if he were right, and what it would mean if he were wrong, is something else entirely.

The aha moment, when it comes, is not the moment you get the right answer. It is the moment you realise that the question goes deeper than you thought. That the thing you were certain about has a crack in it. That the map is not the territory and you have been navigating by the map your whole life.

That moment is rarely available inside a fifty-minute lesson with a learning objective written on the board.

But Was It Deliberate?

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and a little uncomfortable.

Was the school system designed to produce good thinkers who just happen to have been failed by poor implementation? Or was it designed from the start, with a certain kind of clarity about what society actually needs, to produce something else?

The modern school system, in most Western countries, was largely designed in the nineteenth century, at the height of industrialisation. It was explicitly modelled, in many cases, on the factory. Bells, shifts, standardisation, interchangeable outputs. The question being asked by the people who designed it was not "How do we produce philosophers?" It was "How do we produce workers who show up on time, follow instructions, and don't ask awkward questions about who owns the factory?"

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think there was a room somewhere with a map on the wall and a villain stroking a cat, plotting the suppression of critical thought. But I do think that systems have logics, and that the logic of the nineteenth-century school system was not the logic of intellectual liberation. And I think those logics persist, largely unexamined, in the systems we have inherited.

Plato, characteristically, had a more pointed version of the same observation. In the Republic, he argued that most people in most societies are not taught to think, because thinking is dangerous. People who think ask questions. People who ask questions notice things. People who notice things become difficult to govern.

He was not entirely sure this was a problem, which is where Plato becomes complicated. But he was absolutely sure it was a fact.

What You Were Never Taught to Ask

There is a list of questions that schools are, in my experience, structurally resistant to. Not because the teachers don't care. But because the questions don't have answers that fit on a grading scale, and because sitting with them for long enough tends to produce the kind of students who are trouble in the best possible sense.

Questions like: Who decided this was important enough to teach? And: What did they leave out, and why? And: Is it possible that the official version of this event is the version told by the people who won? And: What would it mean if I changed my mind about this? And, most dangerously of all: What am I not being asked to question?

That last one is the Platonic question par excellence. The prisoners in the cave are not being asked to question the shadows. The shadows are just the world. The question of whether there is something outside the cave does not arise, because the structure of the cave makes it unaskable.

The structure of conventional education makes certain questions unaskable in much the same way. Not through force, but through the far more effective method of simply not creating the conditions in which they could occur to you.

The Good News (There Is Some)

Here is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that it's too late, that the damage is done, that a childhood of conditioning cannot be undone. I'm not going to tell you that, because it isn't true, and also because Plato didn't believe it either.

The prisoner in the cave can be freed. The process is uncomfortable, the light genuinely does hurt, at first, but it is possible. And the evidence for it is everywhere, in the people who arrive at genuine thinking late, after the school system has finished with them, through a book that cracked something open, or a conversation that wouldn't resolve, or a question that arrived in the middle of the night and simply refused to go away.

That refusal is thinking. That's what it feels like. Not the smooth retrieval of a prepared answer. The friction of a question that won't close.

If you are reading this and you have had that feeling, and I suspect you have, or you wouldn't have got this far, then the system didn't entirely work. Something got through.

Something in you was not entirely willing to stay in the cave and watch the shadows.

That's the thing about genuine curiosity. It's remarkably hard to educate out of a person completely. It just goes underground for a while, waiting.

The question now is what you do with it. Whether you let the questions back in. Whether you are willing to not know, which is harder than it sounds after decades of being rewarded for knowing. Whether you can sit with a problem long enough to find out what it is actually asking, rather than reaching for the nearest available answer and moving on.

Socrates thought this was the only thing worth doing with a life. He was, admittedly, a difficult dinner guest. But he was also, I would argue, onto something.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. The question of how we actually learn to think, as opposed to how we learn to perform thinking, sits at the centre of everything I do. If this sparked something, I'd love to hear from you at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

What was the first question that school couldn't answer for you? I'd genuinely love to know.