Education

How did you learn
Your first words
When you were a toddler
At home with your family?
Did you master the letters
Of the alphabet alone
Looking at shapes
Foreign and strange?
Did someone teach
What they meant
How they sounded
How they worked together
To form words
Building blocks of language
Strung together to express ideas
Thoughts became permanent
When you learned to write them down.

Who taught you to count
And the meaning of numbers
How to see values
Behind the symbols
How did you learn to add
To subtract, multiply, divide?
How did you learn mathematics
To predict events and see trends?

How did you learn about the past
Great people, good and evil?
How did you discover that man
Descended from beasts
Retaining the vestige
Of aggressive emotions
Cruelty and rage
Greediness and lust

Who introduced you to wise heroes of old
Whose knowledge could rescue us
From the brink of insanity
At the hands of the madmen
Who have done all of this before
Taken from the people
And left corpses in their wake?

Who showed you to bring it all together
To understand just how the world works
To know for certain
That we don’t know it all?

Who taught you?

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The leaders have decided they cannot allow
The thinkers, the writers,
The harvesters of words
To express their own opinions
Instead, they exalt the hidden
Who labor for hours on end
Not knowing
Not understanding
Just doing in strict obedience
What they have been told.

They seek an end to education
To make robots of the masses
Zombie automatons
Who will obey their every wish
While they extract the last ounce of will
From their emptied brainless minds
Because they taught them education
Means nothing in this world
Just worship the Dear Leader
And all will be set right…

How did you learn?