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