I’m bestselling indie writer Teague de La Plaine. This is my weekly newsletter, where I talk about writing and self-publishing in addition to my own life. I keep the newsletter free, because I prefer you spend your money on my books.
As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.
Factory Education
Every empire needs a factory for citizens. Ours calls it school.
We like to imagine education as a ladder to freedom—open to all, blind to birth, meritocratic. But if we apply Stafford Beer’s principle that the purpose of a system is what it does, we see something colder. Our education system doesn’t liberate; it sorts. It trains obedience, filters ambition, and preserves hierarchy under the banner of opportunity.
The Industrial Blueprint
The modern school was designed alongside the factory. Bells signal shifts. Rows teach discipline. Lessons are broken into standardized units; curiosity is graded by compliance. The first goal wasn’t enlightenment—it was efficiency. The state needed punctual, literate workers who could follow orders and balance ledgers. The factory needed hands that wouldn’t revolt.
Two centuries later, the model barely changed. Only the product line did. We now manufacture human capital instead of steel.
Curriculum as Control
Education pretends to prepare young people for life, but most of what it teaches is how to accept structure. History is sanitized for patriotism; economics reduced to consumer etiquette. The deeper skills—critical thinking, empathy, self-mastery—are electives at best, threats at worst.
Ask what schools actually produce. They yield test scores, credentials, and debt. They deliver bodies to labor markets and minds to ideologies. POSIWID: it works exactly as intended.
The University as Debt Machine
Higher education completes the illusion. The university sells the idea of escape—learn your way to freedom. Yet for most students, the price of admission is a lifetime shackle of loans. Knowledge is secondary; the credential is the product.
Research universities chase grants and corporate partnerships. Professors hustle for funding like small-business owners. Ideas become intellectual property. The library becomes a subscription service. Those who can’t pay, can’t learn.
It’s not corruption. It’s structure. The university is capitalism’s finishing school, minting both managers and debtors.
The Myth of Merit
We’re told the system rewards effort. But effort without privilege rarely yields the same result. A gifted child in poverty may study twice as hard to reach half as far. That’s not failure; that’s calibration. The machine measures potential by proximity to power and calls the outcome “fair.”
The lesson sticks: inequality feels earned. That belief is the curriculum’s hidden graduate.
The POSIWID Audit
Does education expand freedom or reinforce compliance? — Compliance.
Does it cultivate curiosity or conformity? — Conformity.
Does it equalize opportunity or encode class? — Encodes class.
Does it serve the learner or the system? — The system.
By function, education’s true purpose is social reproduction, not enlightenment.
The Lost Art of Learning
Real learning is dangerous. It destabilizes dogma, questions authority, asks why until the story unravels. That’s why systems domesticate it. To keep power intact, curiosity must be managed.
Children begin as scientists—testing, touching, exploring—and end as employees. It takes about twelve years to make that happen.
The Human UNity Alternative — Sapienics
Human UNity reclaims education as the engine of evolution, not obedience. The new model is Sapienics—learning for the wise species.
Core principles:
Lifelong mastery. Learning never ends or credentializes. It’s a loop: learn → serve → teach → learn.
Mentorship over management. Teachers as guides, not gatekeepers.
Project-based reality. Students solve actual problems—restore reefs, design energy systems, write stories that heal.
Open knowledge. Global libraries without paywalls; translation as sacred duty.
Ethics and empathy at the core. Intelligence without compassion is regression.
A Sapienics hub could be as small as a village or as vast as a virtual network. No tuition, no rank, just contribution. Learners demonstrate competence by results, not grades.
The Discipline of Wonder
Real education is not easy. It demands the same rigor we once reserved for war. It asks for endurance, humility, and daily confrontation with ignorance. But unlike obedience, this discipline expands capacity instead of shrinking it.
The old system made us literate enough to serve machines. The new must make us wise enough to build ones worth serving.
Closing the Loop
The purpose of the current education system is what it does: create compliant producers and consumers who maintain the status quo. The purpose of Sapienics is what it must do: grow conscious, competent, compassionate humans who can sustain life on this planet.
A civilization that teaches obedience breeds order. One that teaches wisdom breeds continuity. The next syllabus begins with that choice.
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