It's a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don't we? And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns - have you thought of that?” But once having been there, there's a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it's not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and others won't. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. ― Doris Lessing, quote from The Golden Notebook Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” 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 judgements. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.

We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. “Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated.

The golden notebook by doris lessing