Knowledge as a weapon

My first class teacher in the boarding school was a man called Mr. Mackay.

He was the school’s headmaster, a maths teacher.

We were terrified of him.

He would set us a problem.

For mental arithmatic, We had to imagine a snail crawling up a greasy pole,,four and a half inches during the day and then fall back one inch at night.

And if the pole was two feet six inches tall, and how long would it take the snail to get to the top?

And We had to work it all out in our heads, and he would walk up and down in between our desks.

And then he’d say, “You, what’s the answer?”

And if we didn’t get the answer right, he would humiliate us.

, I learned later that he had been a very notorious beater of boys.

but I don’t think he beat us. He didn’t need to. We were quite frightened enough.

Every piece of work we did in that place was marked. And each mark had a numerical value.

We were divided up into teams, called colours.

I was in the blues, and at the end of every day, we had to line up in front of the prefect in charge of our colour and tell him what marks we’d been given.

And they were all added up, and the team with the most marks at the end of term was awarded the Watson Shell.

And the Watson Shell was a First World War shell case that had been polished and put on a wooden stand.

And so learning became associated with fear, with competition, even with warfare.

With gaining power, with beating your fellow human beings,

And that is a model of knowledge that still prevails.

We see it at work in those scientists who are employed in making the incredibly sophisticated weapons that are now destroying Iran and Syria and Lebanon and Gulf States and the Sudan and Ukraine.

the kind of knowledge that being weaponized byTrump and his criminal associates to make money out of the Iran war.

We have to move towards a better definition of knowledge:

knowledge that is gained collectively and that is used for the benefit of everybody.