The Dangerous Truth About School

Here is the HTML code for the story about Doris Lessing. I have formatted the long text into a clean, readable article, used a **classic yellow highlighter style** to emphasize the key intellectual points, and included your **ads at the top and middle** exactly as requested. ```html The Education of Doris Lessing

The Dangerous Truth About School

A Nobel Prize winner said schools should tell every child: 'You are being indoctrinated.' They banned her books instead.

In 1971, Doris Lessing wrote something that made educators furious. She proposed that every child, throughout their entire education, should be told one simple truth: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination."

She didn't stop there. She argued that what students are taught is merely an "amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture." She warned that the people teaching us have already accommodated themselves to a "regime of thought" laid down by their predecessors. It is, she argued, a self-perpetuating system.

Then came the part that really stung:

"Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgments."

This wasn't abstract philosophy. Lessing knew exactly what she was talking about. Born in 1919 in Persia and raised in colonial Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), she grew up in a system designed to maintain rigid social hierarchies. Her education taught her that the British Empire was righteous and that her place as a woman was to marry well and serve. As a teenager, she began questioning everything.

She dropped out of school at 14—not because she rejected learning, but because she rejected indoctrination masquerading as education. She became a self-taught intellectual, reading voraciously and refusing to fit into any predetermined category.

In 1962, Lessing published The Golden Notebook, a novel that became a feminist classic. But it was in the 1971 introduction to the book that she wrote her most radical statement on education—the one that got her books banned. She wasn't attacking teachers; she was attacking systems.

Schools didn't appreciate the critique. Throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Lessing's books were challenged and banned in schools across America and Britain. Not for profanity or sex, but for "promoting anti-establishment views" and "undermining respect for authority." The irony was perfect: She said education systems suppress independent thought, and they proved her right by banning her books.

In 2007, at age 87, Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When reporters swarmed her home to tell her the news, her response was simply, "Oh Christ."

In her acceptance speech, she didn't offer false gratitude. She talked about a young man in Zimbabwe who walked miles just to hear her speak, desperate for knowledge his country couldn't provide. She contrasted him with Western students who had access to everything yet questioned nothing. Her point was clear: Education should teach you to question everything—including the education itself.

Doris Lessing died in 2013, having spent 94 years refusing to accept other people's definitions of reality. Her radical idea—that we should openly tell children they are being shaped to serve society's needs—is still too uncomfortable for most schools to acknowledge.

But every time a student asks, "Why are we learning this?", they are proving Lessing right. Because the truth is dangerous. And independent thought is the most dangerous truth of all.

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