ALIGNING the CITIZEN

ALIGNING the CITIZEN
by Manfred F. Schieder

"The desire of the child to attain an end which he knows, leads him to correct himself. It is not a teacher that makes him notice his mistakes and shows him how to correct it,
but it is a complex work of the child's own intelligence which leads to such a result." (Maria Montessori in "Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook")

     It is the first school day.

     For the smallest ones in the kindergarten, for the older ones the first year of primary school. "Like small, innocent doves," will the school's principal say in his/her greeting speech, as he/she looks at the school uniforms or the simple street clothes the small children wear. Like soldiers (the comparison cannot be avoided and is just as frightening) they will then go, rank by rank, file by file, to their classrooms, the new group of minds waiting to receive new knowledge.

     At either the call of the bell or the clap of the principal's hands - depending on the school's habit - they will enter the classrooms and take up their seats, display their writing tools and the exercise books and listen with great attention, and some fear, yearning for the knowledge the teacher or the instructor will give them. Though they still don't know it - and some will never do - they are grouped into a laboratory-room, a place of painless tortures, ruled by the Department of Education and its subsidiaries (denominations may change from country to country but the institution itself is always the same), that will mould their brains to whatever the government may command.

     Thus the official process of aligning the citizen has started, the slow but exacting process of getting the citizen into line.

     It is the Day of Total Control.

     That philosopher extraordinaire that began and finished at one stroke the full extent of philosophy - Ayn Rand - had harsh words to say about education, comparing the existing system with that horrible activity of times long past, which Victor Hugo described in his book "The Man who laughs": The Comprachicos.

     The Comprachicos dealt with children. They bought them, disfigured them in thousands upon thousands of horrible ways to turn them into clownish gnomes and then sold them to kings and princes for their entertainment. For example, in China they took a small child of, say, two or three years of age, placed it in a vessel of china and kept it there, for years, to grow within this destructive corset. The process crushed the bones and distorted the flesh. At a certain point, by the time the damage had become beyond repair, the container was broken and out came a human being warped to the vessel's deformity.

     Before proceeding, I must inform the reader that the damage did not reach the genes.

     The practice itself hasn't disappeared, however. It's only more subtle, less noticeable.

     Collectivists found out that it is far less risky and, at any rate, far more profitable, to distort the people's brains. Faithful to their evil purposes, they build what corresponds to their aim of standardizing the world's population: robots, brainless beings programmed to obey the various Stalitlers who relish to exploit and send their subjects to their untimely death, a feat for which they are even cheered by the aligned masses. Shouldn't the reader believe this, just take a look at the world's history.

     Government-ruled education is, from the very start, immoral and to defend it by stating that this allows to insure an equality of educational opportunity for the whole population, equals to not understand in the slightest what is involved.

     For it's not a matter of economy, as public education constantly asserts. Even the least informed understands that a private education will ALWAYS be less expensive than the one ruled by an unavoidably overgrown government bureaucracy. But however important this could be for the totality of the population, it hasn't in itself the slightest significance to what the education in government's hands - or the hands of government-protected groups - means philosophically and psychologically.

     For here the basic idea is to indoctrinate the citizen so that he acts, from there on, as a programmed puppet. The main and evident goal is to cut off even the possibility of developing different, perhaps new ideas, starting from personal estimates of the facts and devoid of any inveiglement.

     Ludwig von Mises, that giant economist, said in his major work "Human Action" (Chapter 38: General Education and Economics - Part 5): "Teaching at the elementary level necessarily turns into indoctrination… The party that operates the schools is in a position to propagandize its tenets and to disparage those of other parties."

Even Bertrand Russell, himself not precisely a defender of liberalism (in the European sense of the term), understood the wickedness inherent in public education when he said in his book "Portraits from Memory": "The consequence is that State education… produces, in so far as it is successful, a herd of ignorant fanatics, ready at the word of command to engage in war or persecution as may be required of them. So great is this evil that the world would be a better place… if State education had never been inaugurated."

Ayn Rand states in her writing "Fairness Doctrine for Education": "The government has no right to set itself up as the arbiter of ideas and, therefore, its establishments - the public and semi-public schools - have no right to teach a single viewpoint, excluding all others. They have no right to serve the beliefs of any one group of citizens, leaving others ignored and silenced. They have no right to impose inequality on the citizens who bear equally the burden of supporting them. As in the case of governmental grants to science, it is viciously wrong to force an individual to pay for the teaching of ideas diametrically opposed to his own: it is a profound violation of his rights. This violation becomes monstrous if his ideas are excluded from such public teaching: this means that he is forced to pay for the propagation of that which he regards as false and evil, and for the suppression of that which he regards as true and good."

     Aligning the citizen, which is the declared purpose of every collectivist, carries mankind to its secure destruction, for mankind does not share with the other species the characteristic that allows their survival: to adapt to the environment. On the contrary, man's nature determines the very opposite as his method of survival: he must adjust the environment to his own needs. This condition diametrically opposes to be moved along and to adjust, and requires a very complex activity that only the human being can carry out: to understand reality and its laws and to apply imagination to adapt the materials of the universe - the physical-chemical elements - to his own requirements; imagination being the capacity to combine the elements of reality to human values. Imagination doesn't work in a vacuum; it requires a precise knowledge of the elements to be rearranged.

     The compulsive collectivist education is directly responsible for the permanent state of neurosis that prevails nowadays on the world. But de-individualization was never able nor ever will be able to change the human being from what it is: an individual being. All it was able to do was to crush this essential characteristic under tons of political and social fears that include man's indoctrination to what he is not: formless mass. What came out of it was social disintegration, which is the reversal of the evolutionary process by returning mankind to the state of beasts, the unleashing of hate against the fellow citizens through terrorism (a direct result of those that have been deprived, without noticing it, of their individuality and rationality), the lack of every artistic creativity (bearded and sloven "artists" producing the unjustifiable and disgusting grown-up expressions of the stains with which children try to represent the surrounding reality), herds of hippies and groups of embittered cynics returning to the caves of yore, the general addicton to drugis as the only and horrible escape valve from the world collectivism brought up in its own image, as evidence of its metaphysical malevolence and whose only possible outcome is the rapidly increasing degradation of the species.

     The process of collectivization that originated the above-mentioned outcome starts at the child's early years. These are decisive years, so much that it allowed Jesuits to coin the phrase: "Give us your children for the first seven years of their life and from there on you will be able to do anything you want with them." Which means that they will have, like modern Comprachicos, distorted the child's mind to become an obedient robot. It's precisely in those years that the child is denied a direct contact with reality. He is taught, i.e. compelled, to adapt to what "society" demands. As a fact, he is obliged to adjust to what society - the ruling group - determines, i.e. not to face reality as such. Reality is described as something changeable, insecure, something that is not to be trust. A state of permanent confusion is created in a brain that is still a blank sheet desperately needing informative data, and this allows to obtain the expected results: a wobbly mind that easily adjusts to what the elders command: the teachers first, the spiritual leaders later, finally the dictatorial State. It's really unnecessary to point out that religions permanently and actively participate in this process. Along it, the majority submits, while in a minority the climate of rebellion - the individual who tries to confirm himself in front of a State that doesn't correspond to his being and that wants to destroy him - is permanent.

     But if mankind wants to survive as a species, its future depends on an increasing individualization of each of its members. Every human being must survive and advance FOR HIS OWN RIGHT. There is a social structure - Capitalism - that provides the correct condition for this goal, though in this writing I want to stress another aspect of the matter involved: TO SURVIVE, HUMAN BEINGS REQUIRE INFORMATION, NOT UNIFORMITY.

     There is only one individualizing type of education available: it's the one created by Dr. Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952) in her native Italy. The method was designed for children in their early years of life. It is so utterly undisguised in its purpose of producing INDIVIDUALS that collectivists recognized it at once as its undeniable opponent. When the fascists reached power in Italy they immediately ordered the closing of all schools operated on the Maria Montessori method. In Germany and Austria, during the Nazi-rule years - effigies of the educator where burned on pyres of her books on official places in Berlin and Vienna.

     The Montessori method insists in reaching the point where each child understands, from the very beginning, elemental concepts such as height, thickness, form, texture, color, sound, etc. to, from there on, learn that reality is not capriciously changing and that everything has a corresponding place, that the world that surrounds us is comprehensible and understandable, that things don't disappear inexplicably and that the human being has the capacity to deal with them. This erases the factor "fear" from a mind that is in the process of forming itself and also provides a foundation of security on which it can confide and which will give new and further knowledge. The outcome is a conscious sensation of self-sufficiency (it’s the materials themselves that show the child the process of an objectively correct arrangement and, therefore, the learning child doesn't need to depend on the elder's "authority") and an increasing individualization. This in itself forms human beings able to survive and progress by their own means.

     Ayn Rand explained the process as follows: "Since the purpose of the Montessori material is to help the child in his cognitive development, i.e., to help him grasp the nature of reality and learn to deal with it, the "rigidity" of the problems he has to solve provides him with the most important lesson he will ever learn: it teaches him the Law of Identity. It teaches him that reality is an absolute not to be altered by his whims, and if he wants to deal with it successfully, he must find the one right answer. He learns that a problem does have a solution and that he does have the ability to solve it, but he must look for the answer in the nature of the things he deals with, not in his feelings. This prepares him, from his first cognitive steps, for the time when he is old enough to grasp the principle that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" - by which time that principle has become a thoroughly automatized rule of his mental functioning. The products of an opposite type of training are the wretched neurotics who cry about "the tyranny of reality". (from "The Montessori Method, by Beatrice Hessen - The Objectivist/July 1970).

     The parents, particularly those that were unable to individually overcome the official process of uniformation, should consider with particular attention this question in relation with their children. The world, as produced by collectivism, may be the "ideal" place for coward and malevolent intellectuals and politicians, but it will never be so for human beings that, even if they grew up in collectivism, still retain the capacity, however vaguely it may be, to want a better world for their children. But such a world cannot be created by adhering to what I call "the lullaby's yoke" - the repetitive siren's whisper that things are as they are and cannot be corrected - but by deciding to think things over, to not stubbornly hold to what the hypnotic Comprachicos want us to believe. The human being is not a formless mass but an individual. The repetitive physical deformation doesn't affect the genes (circumcision is one of the many examples for this.) No less is the effect produced by the collectivist's distortion of the mind. Thousands upon thousands of years obliging mankind to behave as a formless mass never produced, nor will it ever, produce such a likeness. Human beings are born as individuals. But it's one's life's duty to assert oneself as such.

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