Empty
Children
Not far to go now. Here is my recipe for empty
children. If you want to cook whole
children, as I suspect we all do, just contradict these stages in the
formula:
1. Remove children from the business of
the world until time has passed for them to learn how to self-teach.
3.
Take all religion out of their lives except the hidden civil religion of
appetite, and positive/negative
reinforcement schedules.
4.
Remove all significant functions from home and family life except its role
as dormitory and casual
companionship. Make parents unpaid agents of the State; recruit them into partnerships to
monitor the conformity of children to an official agenda.
5.
Keep children under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give no private space or time. Fill time with
collective activities. Record behavior
quantitatively.
6.
Addict the young to machinery and electronic displays. Teach that these
are desirable to recreation and
learning both.
7. Use designed games and commercial
entertainment to teach preplanned habits,
attitudes, and language usage.
8.
Pair the selling of merchandise with attractive females in their prime
childbearing years so that the
valences of lovemaking and mothering can be transferred intact to the goods vended.
9. Remove as much private ritual as
possible from young lives, such as the rituals of food preparation and family dining.
10. Keep both parents employed with the
business of strangers. Discourage
independent livelihoods with low start-up costs. Make labor for others
and outside obligations first
priority, self-development second.
11. Grade, evaluate, and assess children
constantly and publicly. Begin early. Make sure everyone knows his or her rank.
12. Honor the highly graded. Keep
grading and real world accomplishment as strictly separate as possible so that a false meritocracy, dependent
on the support of authority to
continue, is created. Push the most independent kids to the margin; do not tolerate real argument.
13.
Forbid the efficient transmission of useful knowledge, such as how to build
a house, repair a car, make a
dress.
14.
Reward dependency in many forms. Call it "teamwork."
15.
Establish visually degraded group environments called "schools" and
arrange mass movements through
these environments at regular intervals. Encourage a level of fluctuating noise (aperiodic negative
reinforcement) so that concentration,
habits of civil discourse, and intellectual investigation are gradually
extinguished from the behavioral
repertoire.
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