The author's sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, showed him that adults who held positions of power over children could be duplicitous. After several uneventful months, she started singling him out in hurtful ways for no apparent reason. On top of the established threat of being paddled arbitrarily, Mrs. Hunter started to humiliate him in front of his classmates and give him lower grades than he had ever gotten before. The toxic combination shattered his self-esteem and his faith in the adult world for years to come. But, in the ashes of that devastating experience was the seed for his future career as critical scholar, including a life-long fascination with duplicity in public education. The more the author studied public education, the more he came to believe that duplicity was an inextricable part of it. It was as though the U.S. public schools operated according to a single Orwellian-style maxim: "no education without alienation." This "culture of duplicity" was not only invisible to most stakeholders. It seemed to reproduce itself with remarkable precision and regularity. This article is concerned with the possible philosophical origins of this culture. (Contains 3 figures and 46 footnotes.)