This is a transcript of an audio essay that originally aired on The Final Straw. Imagine the government hired you for a secret program and it turned out you were the manager of an idiot factory. This idiot factory took normal people and mangled their minds. Idiots come off the assembly line. Do you think you’d feel a moral duty to shut down that idiot factory?And if you couldn’t shut it down would you find some way to burn it down?
Okay.Well, if you are a school teacher and you care about the best interests of the students, I urge you to go into the idiot factory that employs you on Monday with a can of gasoline and a book of matches.

Consider: We do more learning from birth to the age of five than we do the rest of our lives. All of us. All humans. And if you think about it, it makes sense the incredible amount of learning we have to do. Learning for instance that we are separate from the rest of the world, that we end at the bottoms of our feet and tops of our heads: object permanence, the idea things still exist when you can’t see them; language- that sounds mean something, and that words are symbolic representations of something, and which words apply to which things. We learn gravity by throwing mashed potatoes. We learn to walk. The most crucial event for any swivilized human: we learn to control our bowels. We learn that it is bad to walk around leaking and then we learn a complex process to dispose of our leakage.

For the first five years we are Information Processing Machines.We run around and soak up all there is to know about every aspect of our environment that we can explore. Then, at the end of that five years, learning all but stops.
Don’t take my word for it. There’s a wealth of knowledge on the human learning process. None of this is a secret.
So, what is it that we all experience at the age of five thats so traumatic that it completely arrests our learning? What happens to all of us at age five? Answer- we go to school.

Consider this. For the first five years, it’s a flurry of learning.You get to move about and explore, touch things and mimic others, play and be curious.Then, you go to school. What Danial Quinn calls concentration camps of the mind. What I call idiot factories. Square rooms. Regimented desks in rows and columns.Someone dictating the subject to you, teaching at a pace designed for the average student, even if you’re not the average student. You sit. You listen. Your held hostage for several hours.

Trauma. You cease being a person and you become a product on an assembly line.You’re not consulted. You’re programmed.
And we know it doesn’t work. We know that all students with twelve years of schooling forget 90% of what they were taught. They forget it having never used it in life. Not only that, but we know all students forget the same 90%. That means universally we all recognize the valuable 10% and we retain it, and we all recognize what is useless so we don’t bother retaining it. Even the teachers who teach that useless 90% forget the material and have to consult teachers guides before teaching it. So, that means even the teachers know the material is useless and noone will remember it after graduation.

Everyone involved in the education process knows you’re held hostage for roughly twelve years when all the information you retain could be given to you in the equivalent of just one school year.

Now having said all that, I suspect there’s someone out there thinking that if all of this is true, we need to FIX the schools and crank out super-students. Anyone who thinks that has totally missed the point.

Schools aren’t broken. They work as designed. Idiot factories.

Schools don’t just waist your time by shoveling useless information at you. Schools stop you from employing the methods of exploration and curiosity that worked for you for the first five years of life. Schools stop you from discovering useful knowledge on your own. That way, you’re useless and living at home with your parents until you are 18. Then you go to college. You live at home with your parents until you are 25.

The job market does not have to absorb you. You can steal the jobs of those older people who worked their way up. So, schools extend our childhood until our late 20‘s and early 30‘s. Dependent. Incapacitated.

If not for schools getting in the way, 13 year-olds,who are reproductive age, could leave the nest, undercut older workers, and flood the job market.

They’d rule the world.

So, instead, we trick them into sitting on the assembly line. Not learning.

Idiot factories.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility. If your listening, you are the resistance.