In Colonial times, well the Americans revolted against the British, so they don’t appear to have been particularly inoculated by obedience then. And funnily enough, the US is typically more religious than other Western countries, despite most other Western countries teaching Christainity in schools while it’s forbidden in the USA (arguably, because religions in the USA don’t have government support, they have to be on their toes more in keeping people faithful).

Please note I don’t dispute what the aims were of public schools, I just dispute your claim about what public schools actually do achieve.

Wiktionary defines anticorrelated to mean “negatively correlated”, which I think is the better phrase to use, forming a symmetry with “positively correlated”.

Mike Kenny, you are referring to the Westermarck effect, which Pinker also discusses. Your point about exogamy has been used as an explanation for why humans & whales have menopause.

Leicht, that was fairly explicitly the reason for mandatory public education in America (based on the Prussian model). You may also be surprised to know that the Ku Klux Klan was a major booster of it, along with the separation of church & state, for nativist reasons.

Good point about Japan, quanticle.

My impression was that royal incest was mostly between cousins. It also appears that the Westphalian model of related royalty had previously appeared in bronze age mesopotamia.

Nature 450, E-E8 (15 November 2007) “Brief Communciation Arising” “Anti-correlation of summer/winter monsoons?”, De-er Zhang & Longhua Lu.

Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L12713,2007. “Anticorrelated multidecadal variations between surface and subsurface tropical North Atlantic”, Rong Zhang.

The central Asia history of invasion after invasion is deeply ingrained in their culture, while island and geographically peripheral cultures were less obsessed by it.[snip]

Have China, Korea, Japan, etc. learned their lesson about over-centralization, enough to win the next big conflict?

I see a couple of issues with this statement. First, isn’t Japan an island nation? Yet Japan has as much, if not more, of a group focus than China or Korea, despite almost never having its core territory invaded. Yet Japanese society is almost as centralized as Chinese society, even though China has been invaded many more times than Japan has. Sure, Japanese culture has opened up recently. However, I’d argue that’s because of increased trade with the West (particularly America), not because of any innate force originating from inside Japan.

Second, I don’t see the future conflict as being East Asia vs. N. America + Europe. I see the future conflict as being Asia vs. Africa. North America and Europe just don’t have the resources for sustained war (especially modern mechanized warfare, which is especially resource and manpower hungry). Asia and Africa, on the other hand, have the requisite resources, manpower, and authoritarian governments to wage large scale offensive war. The only thing missing is industrialization, and Asia is rapidly catching up in this regard.

And the most powerful & successful engine of that movement has been compulsory government (‘public’) schooling.

Even in free and enlightened 21st Century America, 95%+ of the population is ripped away from the family in their most formative years for establishment-directed “education” (indoctrination).

The history of the drive for public schooling and compulsory attendance in this and other countries clearly shows a deliberate scheme to coerce the mass of the population into a mold desired by the “Establishment”. Recalcitrant minorities were to be forced away from family & ethnic cultures into a majority mold; all citizens were to be inculcated in the civic virtues, notably and always including obedience to the ruling national institutions, including the dominant religion.

From the start of American history, the desire to mold, instruct, and render obedient the mass of the population was the major impetus behind the drive toward public schooling. In colonial days, public schooling was used as a device to suppress religious dissent, as well as imbue virtues of obedience to the ruling government.

One of the most common uses of compulsory public schooling was/is to oppress national ethnic and linguistic minorities or colonized peoples—to force them to abandon their own language and culture on behalf of the language and culture of the ruling groups. The English in Ireland and Quebec, and nations throughout Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia—all dragooned their national minorities into the public schools run by their masters.

Public schools are inherently anti-family, by design.