From early childhood, we are taught that fish swim, snakes slither and birds fly. Except for penguins (and others, but usually we learn about penguins first because people would rather talk about cuddly little penguins than aggressive and dangerous cassowaries). We are told that penguins swim and that they guard their eggs and that they live in Antarctica, but we are not told why they don’t fly, only that they do not. However, there is a reason, besides biology, why penguins don’t fly.

From early childhood we are told that we must attend a university, that we must at the very least obtain a Bachelor’s degree, that our time there will be the best years of our lives. We also know that most college graduates cannot get jobs in the fields that they want unless they choose a technical degree, but we are still encouraged to go regardless. We are not told why we must do these things, however, because the whole idea of higher education is to subvert individual thought and condition us to certain societal standards.

Originally, colleges and universities were primarily reserved for theological and philosophical studies, little else was taught there and all other occupations were entered into either through apprenticeship or by striking off on your own with the bare knowledge you had collected yourself. It wasn’t until the late 1600’s that universities in Germany began offering expanded curricula that diverged from the abstract studies into more earthly subjects. Other universities soon followed suit and a broad range of possibilities opened up, but the number of people who received more than a basic education was still quite small, which is how the situation remained for centuries. Generally, the nobility or the wealthy would send their children to a prestigious university, while only particularly intelligent or gifted commoners would be able to enroll.

This all changed when the Prussian system of education began to be noticed by the rest of the world. The Prussians had made educational advances based on a strict and disciplined method of drilling facts into the students’ heads. Although this worked to an extent, other people began to realize that this system could be used to shape growing young minds into any mold that they desired. Many different factions have used this to their advantage throughout history (e.g. the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, etc.) and even in the United States, we are still subjected to this perversion of education.

Universities do not exist to stimulate thought or creativity. We are subsidized by the government to attend these institutions because they set us in the groove of following a pattern of thinking that has already been established over the past decade or more by elementary and secondary schooling. This pattern exists to efficiently influence large swathes of the younger generations by making them pliable and ready to obey and cater to authority figures. That is the main concept of schooling, to manipulate young people into believing that there is only ever one right way to solve a problem or answer a question and that a mysterious and powerful Führer… *ahem* I mean teacher, has all of the correct answers. It creates a situation where we implicitly trust our leaders because, as we have been taught, those in authority always know what is right.

This means that there can be no compromise, no deviation from that which we have determined to be true because only one fact can be true at a time. That is why schools and universities continuously turn out students who cannot even read because we assume that graduation equals education. That is why we elect and re-elect politicians who lie and embezzle and smear their opponents because they’re already in politics, they must know what they’re doing. That is why we are failing as a country to address even the simplest problems because we no longer remember how to think for ourselves. When we are told that there is only one right answer, we believe it.

We aren’t supposed to pay attention to any of that, however. We are told that we should still go to college, even though it is ineffective and will tie a burden of debt to our feet, from which few of us are likely to ever extricate themselves. And conditioned as we are, we listen and accept the irrationality of going somewhere that is supposed to make us think, but will only lock us into a position of smug ignorance. And that is, ultimately, why penguins do not fly, because they already believe that they have.