Napoleon, Bismarck, the Kaiser, Mussolini, and Hitler were quite right in their perception of the fact that no systems of government can stand for long unless they get hold of the children and can bend the sapling in the way they wish the tree to grow. They must all not only grow their chosen flowers but weed the garden and destroy the vermin ruthlessly to the utmost of their power: the definitions of flower and weed and vermin being in their own hands. Honest government is impossible without honest schools; for honest schools are illegal under dishonest governments. Honest education is dangerous to tyranny and privilege; and systems like the Capitalist system, kept in vogue by popular ignorance, Churches which depend on it for priestly authority, privileged classes which identify civilization with the maintenance of their privileges, and ambitious conquerors and dictators who have to instil royalist idolatry and romantic hero-worship, all use both ignorance and education as underpinnings for general faith in themselves as rulers. Such corruption is at present universal. Democratic education cannot be tolerated under Capitalism because it inevitably leads to Communism, against which Capitalism has to defend itself by systematic propagation of a capitalist doctrine and vilification of Communist teachers so as to make us all proselytes of the Manchester School with an inculcated phobia against any State interference with private profiteering or concern with national welfare. Not only is the trend towards Communism treated as a social danger to be stemmed at all costs: government itself is assumed to be an evil to be minimized as far as possible and to have its powers not only constitutionally limited but broken, even at the cost of revolution and regicide, until the real power passes to private capital and finance, and its official representatives are either disarmed royal scapegoats or armed protectors of private property. All this propaganda has to be disguised as education, and the schools, founded for the enlightenment of the poor and the encouragement of scholarship, are made inaccessible to proletarians by fees beyond their means, and at the same time kept in the atmosphere of feudalism with all its duties abolished and its privileges retained: in short, of simple plutocracy. Finally, education in practice comes to mean mental and moral obfuscation.
Now this is all very well from a capitalist point of view; but Capitalism cannot develop its possibilities without genuine technical education. It must confine its obfuscation to the cultural side. Its accountants may be political idiots; but they must know that two and two make four and not five. Its carpenters must know that twelve feet are longer than twelve inches; and its ship captains know that the world is not flat, even when they have been taught that Jesus was omniscient when he said that in the day of his coming the stars would drop on the earth as specks of soot fall on a pancake.
Thus we have technicians of the utmost eminence politically and religiously obfuscated to a degree that should disqualify them from taking any part in public affairs. They use the words Communism and Communist to denote everything and everybody vile, and thus make infamous proposals that rate welfare of human society above the luxury of the propertied classes. They label Lenin and Stalin as bloodthirsty scoundrels and guttersnipes just as their fathers labelled Hegel, Tyndall, and Bishop Colenso destroyers of religion. Honor, privileges, and authority are heaped on rich and 'well connected' persons who have hardly brains or skill enough to knit socks. Although the country is up to the waist in Communism because there are so many vitally necessary public services out of which capitalists can make no profit, they assume that Communism is as impossible as it is wicked, and throw about such words as Proletariat, Bolshevist, Dictator, Liberty, Democracy, Law and Order, without connecting them with the facts of human life that are staring them in the face all the time: in short, without knowing what on earth they are talking about.
And here again I must remind you that they are not all hypocrites and confidence-trick-swindlers deliberately and cunningly lying for their own ends. They are mostly quite decent folk just parroting the noises they have heard round them all their lives and see printed in their newspapers every day.
--George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What?
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