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.