The Curriculum Of Empire: How Literacy Became a Machine for Control

They didn’t conquer us with force first— they conquered meaning. What if “education” was the most successful imperial technology ever built? From scripture to school bells to algorithms: the same machine, updated. In The Curriculum of Empire, Mark and Lynna trace a hidden lineage: how Christianity colonized conscience, how Prussia engineered the modern school, how empires rewrote alphabets to thin meaning, and how today’s algorithms finish the job—administering reality itself. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a map. And it ends with a return: attention, land, community, and a living world beneath the words. What if literacy wasn’t neutral? What if learning to read was also learning to submit—first to a sacred text, then to the school bell, and finally to the invisible prompt? In this episode, Mark and Lynna tell a continuous story of empire as a curriculum: a long sequence of “software updates” designed to make human beings predictable. We move from Christianity’s interior conquest—where obedience becomes virtue and doubt becomes danger—into Prussia’s revolutionary invention of standardized schooling: time conquered by bells, bodies trained by repetition, and childhood turned into infrastructure. We step into Russia’s alphabet reforms as a case study in symbolic warfare: when a state doesn’t just manage belief, but rewrites the letters that carry memory. Then we bring it forward—into the present. Interfaces, metrics, dashboards, profiles: an administered reality where meaning becomes data and the human spirit is reduced to what can be measured. But we refuse despair. The episode ends with a hope-filled return to the living world—attention reclaimed, language that breathes again, land as relationship, real community, and a future human world that grows organically beneath the managed one.