K-12: How Our Schools Make Monsters

K-12: How Our Schools Make Monsters:
"Lots of people who study K-12 education end up looking for a metaphor, a parallel, to explain the unnecessary stupidity of our public schools.  
Don't bother.  
Ayn Rand has run ahead and done the job.

In 1970, Rand published a very long essay titled "The Comprachicos" (which roughly translates to the child-buyers).  
It lovingly examines a bit of history mentioned in a Victor Hugo novel.  
He wrote about vicious exploiters who mutilate and transform children into all sorts of freaks, dwarfs, gymnasts, and novelties.  
The techniques are analogous to those used by bonsai masters.  
You cut, twist, break, deprive – you do whatever works to make a glorious anomaly.

Finding this history, Rand must have shouted, "Eureka."  
She perceived that Progressive educators are the comprachicos of our time:

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.  They do not hide, they practice their trade in the 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.  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 put a normal brain, they put mental retardation.

...For example:

The 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 ... 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."

...Many people try to explain the failures of modern education by pointing to incompetence and good intentions gone awry.  
...She credits our Education Establishment with evil intent from start to finish..."