The paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought

From Free Thought and Official Propaganda by Bertrand Russell.  Russell deserves great respect for his accomplishments and the quality of his thinking but his very talents sometimes divorced him from humanism and led him into dark positions.  More quotable than believable on many important issues.  

It is very striking that this quote is from an essay in a book published nearly a century ago in 1922.  How far we have drifted from the Classical Liberalism of that time to the repressive, coercive statism of our own.  Russell frequently identified himself as a socialist and yet here he sounds just like a modern Classical Liberal who is often identified now as conservative.  This could have been said by Thomas Sowell, Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt.  

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. 

Even more startling is his identification of the cause of this terrible condition.

This is due primarily to the fact that the State claims a monopoly; but that is by no means the sole cause.

I finished my terminal degree of a masters in 1985.  Allan Bloom published the Closing of the American Mind in 1987.  In hindsight, we now know that  he was right.  By 1995 or 2000 the rot had become widespread.  We now see what Russell was concerned about in 1922.  The philosophical roots are different but the manifestation is the same.

Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion. They are then assailed, throughout the rest of their lives, by statements designed to make them believe all sorts of absurd propositions, such as that Blank’s pills cure all ills, that Spitzbergen is warm and fertile, and that Germans eat corpses. The art of propaganda, as practised by modern politicians and governments, is derived from the art of advertisement. The science of psychology owes a great deal to advertisers. In former days most psychologists would probably have thought that a man could not convince many people of the excellence of his own wares by merely stating emphatically that they were excellent. Experience shows, however, that they were mistaken in this. If I were to stand up once in a public place and state that I am the most modest man alive, I should be laughed at; but if I could raise enough money to make the same statement on all the busses and on hoardings along all the principal railway lines, people would presently become convinced that I had an abnormal shrinking from publicity. If I were to go to a small shopkeeper and say: “Look at your competitor over the way, he is getting your business; don’t you think it would be a good plan to leave your business and stand up in the middle of the road and try to shoot him before he shoots you?”—if I were to say this, any small shopkeeper would think me mad. But when the Government says it with emphasis and a brass band, the small shopkeepers become enthusiastic, and are quite surprised when they find afterwards that business has suffered. Propaganda, conducted by the means which advertisers have found successful, is now one of the recognized methods of government in all advanced countries, and is especially the method by which democratic opinion is created.

Russell was wrong only in this - you do not need money or power to conduct an ideological propaganda campaign.  You only need to be shielded from the consequences of such a campaign.  Why have the patently absurd, racist and coercive notions of social justice and critical supplanted a commitment to freedom of thought and liberty (and Classical Liberalism) in our schools, media, and government bureaucracies?

Because they are able to propagate off the tolerance and prosperity of the Classical Liberal system without oversight or consequences.  Or, that has been the case for the past forty years.  I suspect a reckoning faces us.

Americans value liberty and freedom and are repulsed by the racism, coercion, religious zealotry, and anti-empiricism of the critical theorists and social justice fanatics.  These are not easily reconcilable positions.

And Russell had their number for the critical theorists and social justice fanatics long before they existed and threatened Classical Liberalism. A century ago.