I've never read that book by Thomas Kuhn about paradigm shifts that everyone talked about for a few weeks back in 1990. But somebody told me that the author maintains that scientists can become so fixed within a given paradigm that they are physiologically incapable of seeing certain contradictory data. This is not so much their unwillingness to grasp, anticipate, or embrace new data or a new paradigm, as it is their fundamental inability to see it, even when it is shown and explained to them, and they listen openly and attentively. It is as if they cannot place it on their mental screen even if they try. I think there may be something like that going on with government schooling.
Paradigm shifts happen in phases.
Yet, they still fundamentally believed in communism, and a control economy, idolized Mao and Lenin and solemnly believed in ridiculous stories about capitalist American imperialism. Now there is something to be said for the power of state schooling in the USSR and China to induce this kind of childish mental servility, but the point I am trying to make is that even when people carefully described a radically different political, economic, and social arrangement, these poor people were often completely unable to comprehend or place any trust in what they were being told. I've been in conversations with people about government schooling. Over the course of an hour of discussion, they will seem to be grasping and agreeing with many things I might say about the institution of government monopoly schooling. Like a mantra, or a pious ejaculation, almost word for word, one person after another.