“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.”

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About Doris Lessing

British novelist

Doris Lessing was a British novelist, born in Iran and later associated with Southern Rhodesia and England. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and is known for fiction shaped by displacement, political questionings, and changing personal and social worlds. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, the five-volume Children of Violence sequence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and the five books of Canopus in Argos: Archives. Her work often engages with society, ideology, and the pressures placed on individual lives.

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Books by Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

1962

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Alfred and Emily

2008

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Ben, in the World

2000

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Mara and Dann

1999

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The Summer Before the Dark

1973

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