Key ideas: Published in 1970. "The comprachicos traded in children. They bought them and sold them... And what did they make of these children? Monsters. Why monsters? To laugh.... Victor Hugo wrote this in the nineteenth century. His exalted mind could not conceive that so unspeakable a form of inhumanity would ever be possible again. The twentieth century proved him wrong... To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious. This is the ingenuity practiced by most of today’s educators." (Ayn Rand)
The comprachicos, or comprapequeños, were a strange and hideous nomadic association, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unknown today....
Comprachicos, as well as comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word that means “child-buyers.”
The comprachicos traded in children.
They bought them and sold them.
They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is a different industry.
And what did they make of these children?
Monsters.
Why monsters?
To laugh.
The people needs laughter; so do the kings. Cities require side-show freaks or clowns; palaces require jesters....
To succeed in producing a freak, one must get hold of him early. A dwarf must be started when he is small....
Hence, an art. There were educators. They took a man and turned him into a miscarriage; they took a face and made a muzzle. They stunted growth; they mangled features. This artificial production of teratological cases had its own rules. It was a whole science.
Imagine an inverted orthopedics. Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where God had put harmony, they put deformity. Where God had put perfection, they brought back a botched attempt. And, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it is the botched that was perfect....
The practice of degrading man leads one to the practice of deforming him. Deformity completes the task of political suppression....
The comprachicos had a talent, to disfigure, that made them valuable in politics. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was the iron mask, but that is an awkward means. One cannot populate Europe with iron masks; deformed mountebanks, however, run through the streets without appearing implausible; besides, an iron mask can be torn off, a mask of flesh cannot. To mask you forever by means of your own face, nothing can be more ingenious....
The comprachicos did not merely remove a child’s face, they removed his memory. At least, they removed as much of it as they could. The child was not aware of the mutilation he had suffered. This horrible surgery left traces on his face, not in his mind.
He could remember at most that one day he had been seized by some men, then had fallen asleep, and later they had cured him. Cured him of what? He did not know. Of the burning by sulphur and the incisions by iron, he remembered nothing. During the operation, the comprachicos made the little patient unconscious by means of a stupefying powder that passed for magic and suppressed pain....
In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.
(Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, translation mine [Ayn Rand].)
Victor Hugo wrote this in the nineteenth century. His exalted mind could not conceive that so unspeakable a form of inhumanity would ever be possible again. The twentieth century proved him wrong.
The production of monsters—helpless, twisted monsters whose normal development has been stunted—goes on all around us. But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler than their predecessors: they do not hide, they practice their trade in the open; they do not buy children, the children are delivered to them; they do not use sulphur or iron, they achieve their goal without ever laying a finger on their little victims.
The ancient comprachicos hid the operation, but displayed its results; their heirs have reversed the process: the operation is open, the results are invisible.
In the past, this horrible surgery left traces on a child’s face, not in his mind. Today, it leaves traces in his mind, not on his face. In both cases, the child is not aware of the mutilation he has suffered.
But today’s comprachicos do not use narcotic powders: they take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature had put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious.
This is the ingenuity practiced by most of today’s educators. They are the comprachicos of the mind.
They do not place a child into a vase to adjust his body to its contours. They place him into a “Progressive” nursery school to adjust him to society.
The Progressive nursery schools start a child’s education at the age of three. Their view of a child’s needs is militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual. A child of that age, they claim, is too young for cognitive training; his natural desire is not to learn, but to play.
The development of his conceptual faculty, they claim, is an unnatural burden that should not be imposed on him; he should be free to act on his spontaneous urges and feelings in order to express his subconscious desires, hostilities and fears. The primary goal of a Progressive nursery school is “social adjustment”; this is to be achieved by means of group activities, in which a child is expected to develop both “self-expression” (in the form of anything he might feel like doing) and conformity to the group.
Give me a child for the first seven years,” says a famous maxim attributed to the Jesuits, “and you may do what you like with him afterwards. This is true of most children, with rare, heroically independent exceptions.
The first five or six years of a child’s life are crucial to his cognitive development. They determine, not the content of his mind, but its method of functioning, its psycho-epistemology...
The modern educators—the comprachicos of the mind—are prepared for the second stage of their task: to indoctrinate the children with the kinds of ideas that will make their intellectual recovery unlikely, if not impossible—and to do it by the kind of method that continues and reinforces the conditioning begun in the nursery school.
The program is devised to stunt the minds of those who managed to survive the first stage with some remnants of their rational capacity, and to cripple those who were fortunate enough not to be sent to a Progressive nursery....
To stunt a mind means to arrest its conceptual development, its power to use abstractions—and to keep it on a concrete-bound, perceptual method of functioning.
John Dewey, the father of modern education (including the Progressive nursery schools), opposed the teaching of theoretical (i.e., conceptual) knowledge, and demanded that it be replaced by concrete, “practical” action, in the form of “class projects” which would develop the students’ social spirit.
”The mere absorbing of facts and truths,” he wrote, “is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” (John Dewey, The School and Society, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1956, p. 15.)
This much is true: the perception of reality, the learning of facts, the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, are exclusively individual capacities; the mind is an exclusively individual “affair”; there is no such thing as a collective brain...
The goal of modern education is to stunt, stifle and destroy the students’ capacity to develop such an attitude, as well as its conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions.
There are two different methods of learning: by memorizing and by understanding. The first belongs primarily to the perceptual level of a human consciousness, the second to the conceptual.
The first is achieved by means of repetition and concrete-bound association (a process in which one sensory concrete leads automatically to another, with no regard to content or meaning)... This form of learning is shared with man by the higher animals: all animal training consists of making the animal memorize a series of actions by repetition and association.
The second method of learning—by a process of understanding—is possible only to man. To understand means to focus on the content of a given subject (as against the sensory—visual or auditory—form in which it is communicated), to isolate its essentials, to establish its relationship to the previously known, and to integrate it with the appropriate categories of other subjects. Integration is the essential part of understanding.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn’t answer it at all!...
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.... Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words... So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.
The ultimate result is the half-illiterate college freshmen who are unable to read a book (in the sense of understanding its content, as against looking at its pages) or to write a paper or to spell—or even to speak coherently, which is caused by the inability to organize their thoughts, if any.
When applied to conceptual material, memorizing is the psycho-epistemological destroyer of understanding and of the ability to think. But throughout their grade- and high-school years, memorizing becomes the students’ dominant (and, in some cases, virtually exclusive) method of mental functioning.
They have no other way to cope with the schools’ curricula that consist predominantly of random, haphazard, disintegrated (and unintegratable) snatches of various subjects, without context, continuity or systematic progression.
The material taught in one class has no relation to and frequently contradicts the material taught in another. The cure, introduced by the modem educators, is worse than the disease; it consists in the following procedure:
a “theme” is picked at random for a given period of time, during which every teacher presents his subject in relation to that theme, without context or earlier preparation. For instance, if the theme is “shoes,” the teacher of physics discusses the machinery required to make shoes, the teacher of chemistry discusses the tanning of leather, the teacher of economics discusses the production and consumption of shoes, the teacher of mathematics gives problems in calculating the costs of shoes, the teacher of English reads stories involving shoes (or the plight of the barefoot), and so on.
This substitutes the accidental concrete of an arbitrarily picked “theme” for the conceptual integration of the content of one discipline with that of another—thus conditioning the students’ minds to the concrete-bound, associational method of functioning, while they are dealing with conceptual material. Knowledge acquired in that manner cannot be retained beyond the next exam, and sometimes not even that long.
The indoctrination of children with a mob spirit—under the category of “social adjustment”—is conducted openly and explicitly. The supremacy of the pack is drilled, pounded and forced into the student’s mind by every means available to the comprachicos of the classroom, including the contemptible policy of grading the students on their social adaptability (under various titles)....
The comprachicos do not hide their theories and methods; they propagate them openly, in countless books, lectures, magazines and school brochures. Their theme is clear: they attack the intellect and proclaim their hatred of reason—the rest is gush and slush. Anyone who delivers a helpless child into their hands, does so because he shares their motives. Mistakes of this size are not made innocently.
I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by any one to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views,—or any views, for that matter,—of patriotism or nationalism. (Albert Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluos Man)We should all be so lucky! If you can't afford a private school for your child, consider home schooling. Public schools (in every country) exist to create an obedient, non-thinking "citizen" that would be easy to control by the state.
If you want to grasp what the comprachicos’ methods have done to the mind of a high-school graduate, remember that the intellect is often compared to the faculty of sight. Try to project what you would feel if your eyesight were damaged in such a way that you were left with nothing but peripheral vision.
You would sense vague, unidentifiable shapes floating around you, which would vanish when you tried to focus on them, then would reappear on the periphery and swim and switch and multiply. This is the mental state—and the terror—produced in their students by the comprachicos of Progressive education.
Can such a youth recondition his mental processes? It is possible, but the automatization of a conceptual method of functioning—which, in his nursery-school years, would have been an easy, joyous, natural process——would now require an excruciatingly difficult effort.
The student activists are the comprachicos’ most successful products: they went obediently along every step of the way, never challenging the basic premises inculcated in the Progressive nursery schools.
They act in packs, with the will of the pack as their only guide. The scramble for power among their pack leaders and among different packs does not make them question their premises: they are incapable of questioning anything.
So they cling to the belief that mankind can be united into one happily, harmoniously unanimous pack—by force. Brute, physical force is, to them, a natural form of action. Philosophically, it is clear that when men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements. The activists are the living demonstration of this principle.
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think....
Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.
Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest—and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.