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Weapons <strong>of</strong> Mass Instruction<br />

II3<br />

Social Engineering<br />

Thanks to a 24-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg<br />

who created Facebook, and others like him who founded YouTube,<br />

MySpace and other social networks still unmonitored by political authorities<br />

or academics, thanks to the World-Wide Web and the Internet<br />

as platforms for individually generated connections, the power <strong>of</strong><br />

school as a great dis-connector has been weakened.<br />

These vehicles enable people without any particular status, to<br />

hook up with one another; they even allow mixtures <strong>of</strong> nobodies and<br />

somebodies to exchange ideas and plans; they provide a fountain <strong>of</strong><br />

information which replenishes itself constantly; they encourage creativity<br />

among <strong>mass</strong>es consigned by schooling to become reliable consumers.<br />

Even though this new force is still ih early childhood, already<br />

it has caused governments to surrender a great deal <strong>of</strong> power over<br />

their own currencies. It has emboldened accumulations <strong>of</strong> capital to<br />

move at the speed <strong>of</strong>light from one country to another, destabilizing<br />

conventional markets, making national loyalties conditional and<br />

patriotism questionable. Thanks to the vast new ball <strong>of</strong> connections,<br />

<strong>of</strong>ficial truth in every conceivable area is subject to verification by a<br />

promiscuous collection <strong>of</strong> uncertified critics armed with the tools to<br />

back up their contrarian critiques.<br />

Thanks to the Internet, the concept <strong>of</strong> <strong>mass</strong> schooling by experts<br />

is nearly exhausted.<br />

Lying by Omission<br />

Bruno is a college student in Portugal who wrote to me on May I7,<br />

2008 asking for my take on several matters for which his school holds<br />

<strong>of</strong>ficial positions and monitors compliance with its stances through<br />

testing. It's a common situation everywhere. These unstated biases<br />

presented as gospel truth makes <strong>of</strong>ficial schooling dangerously antieducational,<br />

yet this phenomenon in action is difficult to detect, and<br />

among the young, virtually impossible.<br />

Sometimes these pernicious biases are managed simply by omitting<br />

some key piece <strong>of</strong> information. Such was the case that bothered

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