stpd.net / Percy Did It
We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control / No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teacher, leave them kids alone
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding / How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
— Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall (Parts II & III), The Wall (1979)
To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Temples of conformity / Chapter notes / Percy Did It
The history of education is the history of teaching people to be useful to their masters. Mass compulsory education arrived not from philosophical generosity but from industrial need — factories required literate, punctual, rule-following workers. The Education Acts of the 1880s are an industrial procurement decision dressed as social progress.
The question the document never asks: whose culture, whose economy, whose definition of a fulfilling career?
James C. Scott (Against the Grain, The Art of Not Being Governed) argues that hill peoples fleeing the reach of wet rice cultivation states voluntarily gave up writing. Writing is a state tool — it tallies, records, taxes, conscripts. You need it to count what's in the barn when the barn belongs to someone else. If you control your own barn, you don't need it. Voluntary illiteracy as rational resistance, not primitive ignorance.
This reframes everything that follows. Literacy wasn't a gift delivered to the masses — it was an instrument imposed on them. The printing press democratised knowledge and simultaneously made the population legible to power.
Attended Canford School. Michael Medwin (actor, producer) was a former pupil — co-produced Lindsay Anderson's If (1968), set in a boarding school indistinguishable from Canford: the prefect system, fagging, cold showers, compulsory chapel, the cultivation of the servant who believes himself the master.
If ends in massacre. Anderson wasn't being subtle.
Pink Floyd's The Wall covers the same territory for the comprehensive system — another brick, mass production of compliance. The question both works ask: what exactly is being built, and for whom?
Education is built on bullying. A small group of teachers install a hierarchy of students — prefects, monitors, form captains — to keep the younger pupils in line. The teachers don't have to do it themselves. They don't have to be seen to do it. They simply create the conditions and step back.
This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The lesson being taught is not on the timetable: power flows downward, those with it delegate its enforcement to those who want it, and those at the bottom learn their place. By the time a child leaves school they have spent a decade practising either domination or submission — usually both, depending on the year.
Freire's banking model operates vertically. So does the prefect system. The only difference is who holds the cane.
The Polish cavalry story is one small example of a much larger pattern. We live inside myths that do real work — they don't just decorate the argument, they hold the structure up.
The worker at the other end of the bayonet deserves to die because she wanted to kill me: the foundational myth of every war, the one that lets two people with no quarrel of their own be made to murder each other on behalf of people who will never meet either of them. The bayonet has a worker on each end — neither chose to be there, and the myth that one of them is the enemy is what makes the killing possible.
Household budgets are the same as national budgets — they always have to be balanced in real time: this is the myth that does the work in every austerity argument, every justification for letting people go without. A household cannot create its own currency, cannot borrow at sovereign rates, cannot run a deficit across a century if it chooses to. The equivalence is false, but it is intuitive, and intuitive beats true when you are trying to get someone to accept that there is no money for their school, their hospital, their winter fuel payment.
Education's job, in this light, is partly to install the myths early enough that they feel like common sense by the time anyone is in a position to question them. The temple keeps teaching the old liturgy long after the god has left the building — and also keeps teaching catechisms that were never true in the first place.
Polish cavalry rode out against German tanks in 1939 because the army was equipped and trained for the war that had already happened, not the one in front of it. Education does the same thing, structurally and permanently — it trains people for the world that has just ended, not the one they are about to enter.
Note: the lances-against-panzers image is itself a myth, originally promulgated by German propaganda — the actual cavalry charges were against infantry, not tanks. Use the image deliberately as "the story that's always told," not as established fact.
My own school geography was built around the empire my father's generation might have been sent to administer: cash-crop plantations, colonial trade routes, the management of a tea station somewhere it was assumed Britain would still be running things. By the time I was being taught it, none of that was on offer. I have never once been asked to manage a tea plantation. The curriculum was already a fossil when I sat through it — preparation for a world that had quietly closed down sometime before I was born.
This is the same mechanism as Sheffield training engineers for a steel industry already gone. Education is not merely slow to adapt; it has a structural lag built in, because the people who design curricula are themselves products of the previous system, qualified to recognise only the obsolete. The temple keeps teaching the old liturgy long after the god has left the building.
Education and health services now account for 31.27% of Sheffield's workforce — the single largest employment sector in the city. Educational services alone provide 12.77% of all jobs; fabricated metal product manufacturing, the remnant of the steel industry, accounts for 2.25%. The two universities — the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam — together attract around 60,000 students. The University of Sheffield alone generates over £4.8 billion annually and supports nearly 23,000 jobs. Steel built the city; the universities replaced it. The numbers are not close.
The university is the industry that replaced the industry we used to have. And it teaches people how to work in the industry we used to have. The temple of conformity produces the congregation for a church that burned down.
And what funds it? In 2022 the University of Sheffield topped a list of British universities receiving funding from arms manufacturers — Boeing, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce. The steel city didn't stop making weapons. It outsourced the work to its Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and dressed it in a prospectus. The handcuffs were never a metaphor; they were the business model.
The replacement economy does its own work on the side: old people buy houses near universities and rent them to students. Students are loaded with debt. The debt keeps them compliant — another brick in the wall — for forty or fifty years of mortgage-shaped behaviour. The barn is now full of tuition fees rather than rice, but the tallying logic is identical.
If the chick is not yet fledged, the state — not the nearest available family member — should support it. Costs that should be absorbed collectively land instead on whoever is nearest and least able to carry them. This is the UBI argument at kitchen-table scale rather than national scale.
But there's a second, harder point underneath it. The chick that isn't ready to fly may, given room rather than pressure, discover the antigravity machine. You cannot know in advance which person, allowed to become what they can become rather than forced down the approved path, will change the world in ways nobody could have envisaged. Education — like welfare conditionality — assumes the sorting can be done safely in advance. It can't. The whole value of liberty is that nobody knows yet what it will produce.
My own seven-year-old self, stretching letters unnaturally to finish a page faster, was already finding a route the system hadn't anticipated and wasn't built to recognise as valid — call it an early, small-scale instance of neurodivergence solving a problem the institution had no name for. Multiply that by every child sorted onto the single approved path, and the question becomes: what has been lost that we will never get to find out about?
The chick doesn't have to invent the antigravity machine to deserve the room to exist, either. Someone who doesn't work but reads a great deal and buys yoghurt is pulling rather than pushing — and an economy genuinely needs both kinds of contribution, modest consumption as much as production, even though only one of them shows up on a CV or in a curriculum's idea of usefulness. Fish became tetrapods over a span of time we cannot even really picture, and it worked, eventually, because there was no clock running. We do not have that luxury. If the old definition of contribution — wage labour, commuting, fitting the approved shape — is too slow and too narrow for the timescale we are actually on, then insisting on it anyway, while the planet's clock runs down, is not prudence. It is the system protecting its own categories past the point where they still make sense.
This isn't just a human story, or even a new one. Robert Sapolsky describes naked mole rat colonies maintaining a reserve of about 5% of the population that is, by any conventional measure, fat and lazy — they don't dig, don't forage, don't defend the colony. They are fed and supported anyway, deliberately, because if the colony collapses, they are the ones with enough stored fat to make the long, exhausting trek out and found a new colony elsewhere. The "lazy" 5% are not a drain on the colony's resources. They are the colony's actual survival mechanism, kept in reserve precisely because nobody can know in advance when they'll be needed or what they'll do when they are. A granddaughter who doesn't work, supported by a grandmother who minds the company, may be exactly this: important to the community's survival in ways nobody can specify yet, including her.
I was diagnosed with ADHD two or three years ago, in my late sixties or early seventies — late enough that the diagnosis didn't change anything going forward so much as it handed me a key to everything behind me. Once you have the word, you start re-reading a whole life through it, not to excuse anything, but because the pattern becomes visible for the first time. People are innocent of what they didn't yet know about themselves.
The same wiring was there from adolescence, before I had any name for it — sexual interest more intense and more insistent than it seemed to be for the people around me, the same dopamine-seeking that later found computer equipment and mobile phones, just arriving first in the place adolescence usually arrives. I don't think that needs excusing or explaining away. I think it's simply the earliest instance of a pattern that ran underneath the rest of what follows.
A great deal of whatever success and happiness I've had has come not despite my ADHD but because of it — because I accidentally bumped into things that happened to give me a dopamine hit, rather than because any system identified what I might be good at and pointed me towards it. Nobody designed a path for the kind of brain I have. I found one by luck.
I spent nine years as a square peg in a round hole at a company where, to put it plainly, I was not loved. I trained at my own expense — a fairly hard slog through a marketing qualification, the Institute of Marketing certificate, the kind of thing you can technically bluff your way through but I didn't, particularly — and ended up the only person in the entire business actually qualified in marketing. When the marketing job came up, I wasn't asked a single question about marketing. I was asked about computers, which I knew nothing about. I didn't get the job. The man who did get to make the appointment didn't know anything about marketing either, but he got to choose anyway. That was the whole nine years in miniature: the credential didn't matter, the fit didn't matter, only the box being ticked by someone else's logic.
So I left. Before I did, I went to see about buying the company outright — probably at the instigation of my friend Bill Agnew, the first Quaker I knew, who had taken an interest in me on a management course and seemed to see something in me that the company I worked for never had. I didn't buy it. What I did instead was start my own business, linking computer maintenance companies together so a client like British Telecom didn't need up to forty different providers turning up at the same site for different pieces of kit.
That business didn't work either, in the end — not because the idea was wrong, but because one of my principal contacts simply decided, one day, to cut my commission from 15% to 2%. No negotiation. No warning. Just a unilateral change of terms from the person who happened to hold the leverage, because he could. I was genuinely upset by it — not suicidal, just badly cut up, the way you are when someone you'd trusted simply rewrites the deal because the power was all on his side.
What I did instead of going under was sell the computer equipment I'd already bought directly to the people who actually needed it. It turned out they did need it. That decision — forced on me by someone else's betrayal, not chosen from any plan — became roughly thirty years of dealing in computer equipment: happy, profitable, and genuinely thrilling, in the literal dopamine sense. Being my own boss meant I could work wherever I happened to be. I remember buying one of the first mobile phones and the particular thrill of buying a piece of equipment and selling it on the drive home, because I'd already found the buyer before I'd even put the phone down. Nobody designed that life for me either. It came out of being screwed over by someone who didn't have to answer to anyone for doing it.
Education and employment both run on the same assumption: that the right path can be identified in advance, by someone else, using a credential or a category. Mine never was. What worked, worked because I tripped over it. The unfledged chick again — except this time the chick was thirty-something and had already wasted nine years waiting to be asked the right question.
I've tried, more than once, to coin a word for what those thirty years actually were: playk, a mixture of play and work. The posher term is probably emulsion — two things that don't naturally dissolve into one another, held in suspension together instead. That's closer to the truth than "balance" or "blend." Work and play never merged into one substance for me. They stayed distinct, side by side, each doing what the other couldn't — and that suspension, not any system designed to produce it, is what nine years in a round hole could never give me.
Some make it through. A small number achieve real mobility, enter the professional class, and proceed to reproduce the system for the next cohort. This is not a flaw — it is the mechanism. The occasional success story legitimises the structure and provides its administrators.
Scott again: the state needs a legible, taxable, conscriptable population. Education produces one. The outliers who "succeed" become the state's local agents.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: the banking model of education. Teacher deposits approved knowledge into passive students. The curriculum determines what counts as worth knowing — and reliably excludes knowledge that would help people understand their own exploitation.
Critical thought is permitted within bounds. The bounds are set by those who fund the institutions.
Nick Gibb (former Schools Minister): "Education is the engine of our economy." Answers the question before it's asked.
MLK: "The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society."
MLK is right. But neither version asks who sets the terms of the moral framework, or in whose interest the efficiency runs.
This is a working draft, published deliberately unfinished. Percy Did It grows through conversation — if something here is wrong, missing, or leads somewhere I haven't seen, tell me.