THE REDACTED EDIT: The Compliance Curriculum
How schools became behaviour modification labs
Welcome to the first quarter of the year where we dissect the machinery…
For the next three months, we’re pulling apart institutions specifically the ones you were taught to trust and the ones that shaped you before you knew what shaping was.
We’re talking propaganda, compliance engineering, manufactured consent, and the systems designed to make you behave without ever raising your hand to ask why.
I’m not doing theory. This is architecture. The blueprints they don’t show you, the redacted paragraphs. and the fine print written in invisible ink.
Let’s start where it always starts: childhood.
The Compliance Curriculum
You probably don’t remember the first time you asked to use the bathroom and were told “no.”
I can bet your nervous system does.
That moment when you realised your body’s needs were subject to someone else’s approval was the first brick in a very long wall.
Welcome to school or as I prefer to call it: obedience training with textbooks.
Schools don’t exist to educate you.
They exist to socialise you and by “socialise,” I mean: teach you to sit still, follow instructions, accept arbitrary authority, suppress your instincts, and measure your worth by external validation.
Sound harsh?
Let’s look at what schools actually do versus what they say they do.
What they say: “We’re preparing students for the real world.”
What they do: Train children to:
Raise their hand before speaking (seek permission)
Move only when a bell rings (stimulus-response conditioning)
Accept that their day is divided into arbitrary blocks of time they don’t control (external locus of control)
Sit in rows facing one authority figure (power hierarchy naturalisation)
Compete for grades that have nothing to do with actual competence (gamified compliance)
Believe that boredom is normal and must be endured (learned helplessness)
This isn’t education.
This is domestication.
Now… the part they skip in teacher training
Let’s rewind to 1806. Prussia.
They just got their asses handed to them by Napoleon at Jena.
National humiliation.
Existential crisis.
The Prussian state needs to rebuild and fast.
Enter Johann Gottlieb Fichte, philosopher and nationalist. He proposes a radical solution:
Compulsory state education.
This wasn’t to enlighten the masses BUT to create obedient soldiers and compliant workers.
Fichte literally wrote:
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”
Read that again.
“Destroying free will.”
He wasn’t hiding it. That was the goal. The Prussian model worked beautifully.
Standardised curriculum.
Age-based grade levels.
Rote memorisation.
Strict discipline.
Unquestioning obedience to authority.
They didn’t create thinkers. They created interchangeable parts for the industrial machine.
And because imperialism gonna imperialism - the rest of the world copied it! yay.
The American imports
1840s-1850s: American education reformers visit Prussia. They’re impressed.
Horace Mann, the “father of American public education,” comes back starry-eyed. He loves the efficiency. The order. The control.
By the late 1800s, the Prussian model is embedded in American schools.
Compulsory attendance laws, standardised testing, age-based grades, the bell system (literally borrowed from factories).
The goal, as stated by early industrialists who funded these schools?
“We want workers, not thinkers.”
In 1905, John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board wrote:
“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science... The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organise children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Translation: Sit down. Shut up. Do what you’re told. Don’t improve the system just execute it better.
I want to get technical because this isn’t accidental. It’s engineered!
Modern schools use behaviour modification techniques straight out of operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner) and behaviourism (Watson, Pavlov).
In case you didn’t know, that is the stuff they used on rats and dogs.
1. Token economy systems
Stickers. Gold stars. “Class Dojo points.” Prizes for compliance.
This is variable ratio reinforcement: the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive.
Kids learn:
Behavior → Reward. It’s because an external authority decided it does not because the behaviour matters.
Result: You grow up needing external validation to know if you’re doing “good” and you lose internal reference.
2. Punishment schedules
Detention. Suspension. Loss of recess. Public shaming (writing names on the board, anyone?). I was made to stand with my nose to wall.
Classical aversive conditioning.
Do the “wrong” thing → experience discomfort.
The “wrong” things are often completely arbitrary: talking out of turn, fidgeting, asking “why” too many times…
Result: You learn to suppress natural impulses (curiosity, movement, social connection) to avoid punishment. Self-censorship becomes automatic.
3. Normalisation of surveillance
Cameras in hallways. Hall passes to move. “Bathroom breaks” rationed. Bag checks.
You’re being watched. Always. Weirdly you learn this is normal.
Result: Internalised surveillance, you police yourself even when no one’s watching, Panopticon thinking to the max!
4. Arbitrary authority acceptance
Teachers have power because they’re teachers. Principals because they’re principals. Rules exist because they exist.
You’re not taught why the rule matters or whether it’s just.
You’re taught: authority is self-justifying.
Result: You become an adult who doesn’t question power structures.
“That’s just how it is.”
5. Standardised testing as psychological warfare
Your worth = a number.
Your future = determined by how you perform under artificial time pressure on decontextualised questions designed by people you’ll never meet.
This is learned helplessness training. You internalise: “The system evaluates me. I don’t evaluate the system.”
Result: You spend your life trying to “measure up” to external standards instead of building internal standards of excellence. Then somewhere in your 40s,50s decide to deprogramme all this stuff?
As an NLP trainer, I see the linguistic patterns embedded in school culture and they’re chef’s kiss levels of insidious.
Some embedded commands for you to revisit:
“You need to pay attention.”
(Presupposition: you’re NOT paying attention. Embedded command: comply.)
“Raise your hand if you want to speak.”
(Presupposition: your speech is subject to permission. Embedded command: seek approval.)
“This will be on the test.”
(Presupposition: your value is determined by test performance. Embedded command: prioritise what we measure, ignore what we don’t.)
A linguistic bind:
“Are you going to behave, or do you need to go to the principal’s office?”
(Behaviour = compliance. Non-compliance = punishment. The bind assumes the authority’s framing is reality.)
Presupposition Stacking:
“When you finish this worksheet, you can go to lunch.”
(Presuppositions: You WILL finish. Lunch is a reward for compliance. Your hunger is secondary to task completion.)
The pattern:
Language that makes obedience the only logical frame. Resistance doesn’t compute within the sentence structure itself.
You’re being programmed linguistically before you have the critical thinking skills to notice.
And yep, before you come for me that Mrs. Tomkins or whatever wouldn’t go to this length and do all this… well it happened to her and that’s what she knows because that is what the system did - created a chain that went on and on, there was a plan at the start and everyone’s just blindly carried it out since.
My dark notes…
Note 1: Special Education as containment
The rise of ADHD diagnoses correlates suspiciously with the elimination of recess, the increase in seat-time requirements, and the defunding of arts/PE programs.
Translation: We designed a system that’s incompatible with how children’s brains work, then we medicate the children instead of changing the system.
READ THAT AGAIN.
Ritalin prescriptions for kids went from near-zero in the 1970s to millions by the 2000s.
Convenient how “can’t sit still for 7 hours straight” became a disorder right when schools decided that’s what kids should do.
Note 2: Zero Tolerance = Zero Thinking
Zero tolerance policies (born in the 1990s drug war hysteria) remove discretion from authority figures.
A kid brings a butter knife in their lunchbox? Expelled. Same punishment as bringing a gun.
Why? Well because the goal isn’t safety.
Humans who think contextually are unpredictable. Humans who follow scripts without deviation? Controllable.
Note 3: The School-to-Prison pipeline isn’t a bug.
Disproportionate suspensions for black and brown students, police officers stationed in schools (”School Resource Officers”), metal detectors, arrests for “disruption.”
Schools in low-income areas look and function like minimum-security prisons.
Same architecture. Same surveillance. Same power dynamics.
You’re training kids to accept incarceration aesthetics as normal. Hello!
And then we act surprised when those same kids end up in actual prisons at disproportionate rates.
You’re an adult now. School’s over. But is it?
Let’s inventory what might still be running in the background:
Do you:
Feel guilty taking a break unless you’ve “earned” it?
Need external validation (likes, promotions, praise) to feel good about your work?
Struggle to self-direct without deadlines or authority figures telling you what to do?
Feel anxious when you’re “supposed” to be doing something and you’re not?
Believe that suffering = learning (no pain, no gain)?
Equate your worth with productivity?
Congratulations. The curriculum worked.
You were trained to be a good worker. Compliant. Productive. Self-monitoring.
Sadly not a free thinker. Definitely not self-sovereign. Certainly not ungovernable.
If schools are so focused on “critical thinking,” why do they punish students who question the rules?
If schools are about “creativity,” why do they eliminate recess, art, music, and play?
If schools are about “individuality,” why do they enforce uniforms, standardised tests, and identical learning paces?
Those aren’t the real goals.
The real goal is compliance at scale.
And it worked… big time. So much so, that some of you won’t question it even if someone suggested it.
I’m not saying “burn down the schools”
I’m saying: notice the pattern.
Notice when you:
Seek permission you don’t need
Wait for external validation before trusting your judgment
Obey rules you haven’t questioned
Accept authority because it’s authority
Those are the trained responses.
You can unlearn them but first you have to see them.
That’s the work.
The system that “shaped” you wasn’t interested in your flourishing.
It was interested in your compliance.
And the most insidious part?
It convinced you it was for your own good.
If this made you rethink everything you thought was “normal” about school - good. That’s the point.
Subscribe to THE REDACTED EDIT for weekly deep-dives into the systems of control you were never supposed to notice. Psychology, power, and the parts they don’t publish.
Support this work. It takes time to excavate what they buried.
After reading this, it’s easy to notice the habits picked up in school, like always waiting for permission to speak or needing someone to check work. It’s kind of shocking to see how much of this was designed by the system.