An amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture

“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. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. 

 

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. 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.”

Doris Lessing

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photograph by Joel Meyerowitz via

Quoting Doris Lessing

"The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion."
Doris Lessing



Doris May Lessing (1919-2013), born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran, was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 - the eleventh woman and the oldest person (88 years and 52 days) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny" (via).
In "The Golden Notebook" (1962), Lessing describes Anna Wulf's strive for honesty freedom from "the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocriscy afflicting her generation", she "tries to live with the freedom of a man". Lessing was attacked for being "unfeminine" in the weay she depicts female anger and aggression. Her response: "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic." (via)

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photograph of Doris Lessing by Inge Morath (1993), (c) The Inge Morath Foundation Magnum Photos via