# Unorthodox Education



## Stormcat (Jan 7, 2016)

So I'm writing a story wherein there is a black market. But it's not drugs or weapons or even people who are bought and sold here. No, the item sold is far more precious.

Education.

You see, this world is a theocratic regime where most citizens can barely read and write. Only the upper crust can afford to attend the one school, and while there all they learn is various flavors of "God did it, stop asking questions". Yet as we learned from _Serenity_, You can't stop the signal. There are teachers out there, former professors who refused to stop teaching evolution and other controversial topics, the historians who know that the church's history contains more blood than any war, and even philosophers who dare ask "but what if you are wrong?"

The world of my story is full of the knowledge-hungry and inquisitive, but the church has decreed that such education is frivolous, especially for the common man. They take only that which they like and reject entire fields of science and mathematics because they don't mesh with their bizarre theology. Book burnings are common, and former libraries and schools have now been turned into brothels and workhouses. The theocratic elite tried to kill off the educated, so students must study in secret. The former university professors are wanted men and women, but their love of teaching is so powerful, they risk life and death everyday to spread the knowledge.

So, I need help planning out this "University underground". It combines elements of the aforementioned black market, a secret society, and a university. How does this organization recruit eager new students without alerting the church? How does it protect itself? This is gonna be big, so I'll add new questions as they arise.


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## InstituteMan (Jan 7, 2016)

This sounds functionally similar to Fahrenheit 451. An underground black market in education would have to bring members in very slowly. The thing is, even an Orwellian Big Brother can't be everywhere at once--and even if every room, vehicle, tree, and park bench has a bug in it, to process all of the information collected in real time is an impossibility. Maybe a camping club is actually an astronomy class. Maybe a church study group is really studying literature instead of religion. There are a lot of possibilities.


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## Stormcat (Jan 8, 2016)

InstituteMan said:


> This sounds functionally similar to Fahrenheit 451. An underground black market in education would have to bring members in very slowly. The thing is, even an Orwellian Big Brother can't be everywhere at once--and even if every room, vehicle, tree, and park bench has a bug in it, to process all of the information collected in real time is an impossibility. Maybe a camping club is actually an astronomy class. Maybe a church study group is really studying literature instead of religion. There are a lot of possibilities.



But what if the theocracy doesn't even allow citizens to gather in that capacity? No "clubs" are allowed!


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## InstituteMan (Jan 8, 2016)

Stormcat said:


> But what if the theocracy doesn't even allow citizens to gather in that capacity? No "clubs" are allowed!



People have to move about in their everyday life. One literary example of a religious society that tried to exert control similar to what you describe is The Handmaid's Tale, but even in that tightly controlled theocratic society Offred found the resistance.

Every human interaction gives a chance to make an illicit connection, so focus on the interactions allowed in your dystopian society. There could be some secret meeting that happens at midnight or something, but the way you would learn about the meeting is little by little when you deliver eggs (or whatever) to one of the mid level leaders of the group.


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## Stormcat (Jan 8, 2016)

All public gatherings are monitored, but there is a nice system of unused subway tunnels under the main city that allow for the development of a more traditional black market and allows people to traverse the city without being seen by the Watchtower guards.


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## Sam (Jan 8, 2016)

Stormcat said:


> So I'm writing a story wherein there is a black market. But it's not drugs or weapons or even people who are bought and sold here. No, the item sold is far more precious.
> 
> Education.
> 
> ...



You're talking about the history of the world. 

Up until the 1900s, the only people who could read and write were rich people. 

It was impossible for a poor person to get an education; ergo, they couldn't read and write.


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## Stormcat (Jan 8, 2016)

Sam said:


> You're talking about the history of the world.
> 
> Up until the 1900s, the only people who could read and write were rich people.
> 
> It was impossible for a poor person to get an education; ergo, they couldn't read and write.



Actually, compulsory education was started earlier than that, sometime in the 1800s actually. Can't remember the exact year though.

But in this situation, the educated are actively hiding from the government, that was not the case in olde times where you flaunted your ability to read and write to anyone who would listen. Girls especially are forbidden from learning how to read. The theocracy wants to keep the population dumb so they are easier to control.


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## Riis Marshall (Jan 8, 2016)

Hello Stormy

_Fahrenheit 451_ is as good a place as any to start. Where there's a will, there's a way. 

@Sam

I'm afraid I have to argue with you.

I'm not sure what part of the world you are from but a careful reading of American history will demonstrate many so-called poor people could read and write. My great great great grandfather was of Irish - we think - heritage and grew up in Central Pennsylvania. He was a charcoal burner, clearly not somebody we would describe as 'rich'. He, his wife and children could read and write.

Even some slaves in Southern US prior to the Civil War could read and write; not only read and write but, although it was illegal _and_ _dangerous_, pass this learning on to their children.

My grandparents on my mother's side worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad as engineers, firemen, pattern makers, cabinet makers and machinists in the Juniata shops. Prior to 1900 they had the complete works of Twain and Dickens, among other books on their shelves. 

All the best with your writing.

Warmest regards
Riis


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## InstituteMan (Jan 8, 2016)

Stormcat said:


> But in this situation, the educated are actively hiding from the government, that was not the case in olde times where you flaunted your ability to read and write to anyone who would listen. Girls especially are forbidden from learning how to read. The theocracy wants to keep the population dumb so they are easier to control.



This does sound a lot like the scenario in The Handmaid's Tale, right down to the misogyny of the system. 

Also, I don't think you should underestimate the ability of people to communicate with one another about unapproved topics, even under constant supervision. 

For any society of any size (beyond that of a typical cult, say), there's a LOT more people to watch and than there are official watchers. Sure, you could lock people up in individual pods, but that makes for a pretty boring story until someone escapes.

Granted, the Evil Overlords in your story will want everyone to think that they are being watched all the time, but any clever revolutionary will realize that this isn't possible. Even if you may be being spied on when you walk down the street, the odds that you are actually being supervised by someone in the employment of the Evil Overlords won't be very high on any given instance. Revolutionaries can improve their chances even further by talking in code, such as by re-approriating the approved language of the religion/government to describe other things.

If the Evil Overlords employ enough people to actually closely watch absolutely everyone all the time, then there will be problems with economic impracticality. To devote that amount of resources to the police state would deprive other sections of the economy of resources needed to feed and house people, which will make the revolution even more likely (hungry homeless people will put up quite a fight when they have nothing left to lose). 

Worse yet (from the point of view of the Evil Overlords), good help is hard to come by. Inevitably, a large percentage of the massive surveillance state apparatus will be incompetent or actually subversive. The most dangerous underground opposition to your Evil Overlords could very well be in the apparatus of the police state itself.

You have a lot of options. Good luck, and happy writing!


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## K.S. Crooks (Jan 9, 2016)

This reminds me of the Illuminati and what slaves in America had to do in order to teach their children anything the slave owners didn't want them to know such as how to read and write. Perhaps do some research in either of these areas. what is often the case in these situations is that groups are small and on group doesn't know the meeting times or places of another.


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## Sam (Jan 9, 2016)

Riis Marshall said:


> Hello Stormy
> 
> _Fahrenheit 451_ is as good a place as any to start. Where there's a will, there's a way.
> 
> ...



How did they afford their education? 

You can't read or write without an education, and education in those times could only be afforded by people of wealth. 

I know people today who cannot read or write because they didn't go to school, and their parents didn't bother to teach them, so they can only speak the language. They can't read or write it.


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## Riis Marshall (Jan 9, 2016)

Hello Sam



> You can't read or write without an education, and education in those times could only be afforded by people of wealth.




You may want to check out this Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States (with the usual warnings about supporting Wikipedia articles with other references, of course).

Within my family to this day, and certainly during the nineteenth century, there is nobody I would describe as a 'person of wealth'.

All the best with your writing.

Warmest regards
Riis


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## Sam (Jan 9, 2016)

Well, that's the way it was in the United Kingdom and Ireland. 

If you couldn't afford an education in those times, you never learned how to read and write.


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## InstituteMan (Jan 9, 2016)

While a little bit of a tangent, the history of education in the US diverges significantly from the European experience, particularly during the time of the western expansion of the US. Pioneers and settlers in the US would pool their labor and resources to build one room schools and hire teachers. There was a historical notion of public education for all as a common good. I wouldn't claim that the education a poor child received in a one room school was exceptional by any stretch of the imagination, but society in America did expect every child to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic (the source of the "Three R's" to my my knowledge). 

To the matter at hand, I could easily imagine a "one room school" concept being implemented in the underground of the dystopia of Stormcat's story where families pool resources to educate their children.


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## Riis Marshall (Jan 10, 2016)

Hello folks

Great thread - let's keep it going.

I can remember reading a statistic in 1957 when I went off to the big city to Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University. Then in the US about 50% of high school graduates went on to either college or university, while in Britain the figure was about 14%. This, of course, has nothing to do with Sam's argument about basic reading and writing prior to 1900 but it supports Instituteman's contention about differences between the views of Europeans versus Americans on basic education.

Incidentally, if the house where I grew up had been located about one-half mile to the west, my eight years of primary education would have been in a one-room school complete with _The Little House on the Prairie_ pot-belly stove, although the slates and chalk had been replaced with paper, pencils and pens, and the benches with individual desks.

All the best with your writing.

Warmest regards
Riis


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## JustRob (Jan 10, 2016)

A teacher at my school said something that has stuck with me all my life. That is after all what teachers ought to do. He said that you don't go to school to learn, but to learn to learn. I interpret that to imply that once you have that skill you can yourself choose what it is that you will learn and the process becomes autonomous with tutors who guide you rather than teach. It isn't possible to prevent the human brain from learning and devising new survival techniques. That is the purpose for which it evolved.

Stable hierarchies depend on the people at each level believing that they are high enough up to survive. This means that they must endeavour to give the next level down the same illusion, as their own survival depends on that. So it goes on right throughout the structure. If at _any_ level, not just the lowermost, doubts arise, then a hierarchy or part of it will collapse. 

I think you need to consider your version of society holistically rather than as a simple "them and us" situation. The problem for any such polarised society is that no individual can ever be absolutely sure which side they are on unless an arbitrary permanent determinant like gender or ethnicity is used. Even then some people will find themselves on the borderline and possibly become agents for change. Your hierarchy seems to be less well defined than that anyway, so could well be open to weaknesses developing anywhere. To decide how and where that happens you probably need to consider how factors such as learning, education, indoctrination and imposition balance against each other, these terms lying on a scale of relative control by one party or the other. Writers have played endlessly with the problem of determining which "side" any group or individual may be on. Two examples that spring to mind are George Orwell's _Animal Farm _and the film _Logan's Run. _In one an attempt at change from the bottom changes little ultimately whereas in the other an attempt from near the top succeeds.

Having decided where the weak points in your social structure most likely are you shouldn't find it difficult to work out the exact form that underground movements would take and how they would ultimately succeed.

I guess I'm not telling you anything here but suggesting how you might find out for yourself. My teacher must have made a lasting impression on me with his words then.


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## Stormcat (Jan 11, 2016)

This is all making me wonder how they do it in third world countries. Do they literally just say "Meet under the big tree at noon" and whoever shows up learns something? I'd like more information on that.


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## TheWonderingNovice (Jan 11, 2016)

Just my two cents

Documentaries should serve as a good resource when wanting learn about third world education.
(Just my opinion)

Some parts of the middle east still forbid women from learning but they still find ways to educate themselves. 

Just like many have said Fahrenheit 451 is a great place to start. You can also look at the histories of other countries before the 20th century.


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## Riis Marshall (Jan 12, 2016)

Hello Stormy

In Nigeria, the only African country I have any experience with, the daily message goes out: 'Meet under the big tree at noon" and they _all_ show up.

All the best with your writing.

Warmest regards
Riis


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