24
DORIS LESSING
tern: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false
dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense
this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further molding,
tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work
where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institu–
tions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics,
we give little attention to the people who leave - that process of
elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early,
those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to
a thing because that is what they are already like. A young police–
man leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A
young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social
mechanism goes almost unnoticed - yet it is as powerful as any in
keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
These children who have spent years inside the training system
become critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the
artist, so foolishly looks for - imaginative and original judgment.
What they can do, and what they do very well, is to tell the writer
how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and
thinking - the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They
are wind gauges - invaluable. They are the most sensitive of baro–
meters of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion
here sooner than anywhere except in the political field; it is because
these are people whose whole education has been just that - to look
outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authori–
ty figures, to "received opinion" - a marvelously revealing phrase.
It
may be that there is no other way of educating people. Pos–
sibly, but I don't believe it.
In
the meantime it would be a help at
least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names.
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout
his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process
of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of educa–
tion that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the
best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of
current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The
slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You
are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate
themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors.
