The deliberate sabotage of education

“Machiavelli’s fundamental contrariety resides in his view of human nature. His work teems with dismal pronouncements on his fellow men. They are fickle, selfish and evil. They do good only under constraint. They are both deceitful and easily deceived. They are envious, more prone to evil than to good, inefficient, discontented and ambitious. Human nature is an unstable amalgam of stupidity, cupidity and malice. And the rulers are no better than the ruled. Yet, despite this profound pessimism, Machiavelli clings to a belief that it is possible both to devise and to teach rules for effective political behaviour; to persuade men to eschew wickedness; to inspire them to selflessness; and to awaken in them a civic spirit. This is why he bothers to write at all.”Sydney Anglo, “Niccolo Machiavelli: the anatomy of political and military decadence”, From Plato to Nato.

I thought it prudent to start this essay with a quote I discovered when I was convinced that the world had reached unprecedented levels of stupidity and malice – the year 2025. My defence to the normalised, unrelenting cruelty the daily news brought to my attention – routinely left unanswered by lawmakers and politicians – was to educate myself about the past through political history. And there it was, everything I feared about humanity and its nature, the cycles of political implementation of new ideas and their subsequent mutation into evil tools of oppression eventually leading to revolution, and the constant battle between the powerful rulers and the powerless ruled. The act of discovering those writings points to the obvious fact that humanity has somehow survived, and through that some predecessors have dedicated their lives passing valuable knowledge down to us, the future generations, in an attempt to prompt us to at least make our own mistakes instead of repeating the old ones. What these brilliant minds of the past couldn’t have predicted is that the high-tech “developed” countries of the 21^st century would instead choose to embrace stupidity, cupidity and malice, even weaponise it in some cases, as psychoanalysis brought a deeper understanding of how easily manipulated uneducated masses can be. The rest is history and has been stirring humanity steadily back towards the Middle Ages ever since.

Education was once considered to be a fundamental human right, since knowledge was recognised as a source of power – power to win an argument through reason, power to win a battle through strategy, power to build a city through planning, power to understand the world through logic and improve humanity’s place in it. It made civic sense to have an educated public that will help the country progress through research and innovation, as this would translate into better living conditions for all.

My belief is that it was this exact realisation that has led the powerful to resort to a slow, deliberate but yet untraceable sabotage of the educational system. The best way to win the battle that has been fought since the beginning of time is to strip the opponent of their weapons – not money, which was tried with relative success without the anticipated elimination, but the mind, the source of reasoning, thinking, reacting, rebelling.

In our hyper-consumer capitalist era, knowledge is directly associated with profit and most academic institutions are slowly morphing into capitalistic machines of efficiency training, and costly ones for that matter, as a basic undergraduate degree will warmly envelop you in £60,000 of debt before you are sent out to the world to “produce”. Students are no longer free creative minds that learn new ideas, skills and critical thinking in a stimulating university environment of healthy competition; they are clients that need to be gently handled, clients that can complain, clients that must be made to pass their assessments in order to attract more new clients through meaningless statistics of low failing rates. And in the process, the educational system loses any credibility, appeal or actual ability to produce bright new thinkers that will try to change or challenge any aspect of the established systems of power.

Universities are supposed to be free, fertile grounds for questioning ideas, ideologies and the established norm. They are inherently antisystemic, as their role is to teach young people to be critical. The moment they operate following the profit/growth driven strategies of capitalist enterprises, they become training institutes and should no longer bear the name university, as semiotics matter. At the moment, going to university has turned into an expensive “life choice” that comes with a certificate of attendance as a little memento, all smiles and compliments from upper management for choosing them, in this competitive market. And when real life happens and the education standards of the new generations have dropped so low that I, an average middle aged architect, start feeling like a genius, we can all rest assured that there will be no creative new ideas to change the world, no teachings to inspire selflessness or unity and no chance of escaping the stupidity, cupidity and malice of the human race. This profound pessimism that I share with Machiavelli, is not for a lack of belief in people, but springs from a deeper understanding of the systematic weakening of education by those in power and from the realisation that the situation we are heading towards might sadly be irreversible if academia in its forceful entirety doesn’t react now.

Author: Atticus Finch (2025)