How Public ‘State Education’ is Mentally Dismembering Children
This past Halloween I had an opportunity to take part in an activity that I haven’t done in a couple of decades—hand out candy to the children on Beggers Night.
It was fun to see the creative costumes, some of beautiful princesses, while others, usually the boys, dressed as scary monsters from movies. The scariest was, hands down, a young man who dressed up as Michael Meyers from the “Halloween” movies. Even the other kids wanted to stay clear of him. He had it down so well, the jump suit, the walk. He said nothing as he approached, we carefully put the goodies in his bag.
A few of the kids simply wore outfits to look like bums or super heroes. I remember doing similar things as I prepared to rush the neighborhood in a contest to see how much I could collect. It was a good time with fine memories that rushed back as each new batch of kids came up with their open bags yelling “Trick or Treat!”
My main attention, however, was on the little children, so innocent and some not really sure why their parents were encouraging them to approach these strangers. And why were they giving out candy? But always, with their parent’s encouragement they accepted and said “tank too.” So sweet. They made you want to hug them.
The parents of the little ones seemed to be having the best time with the experience. You could feel their love of their children. This was a family outing. This was Americana at its best: family, neighbors hugging neighbors.
But as I watched this wonderful experience, a thought went through my head and anger seeped in to my happy feelings. I kept thinking about the following Monday when these children would be forced into the local school house, away from their loving parents and into the control of a system that was designed to take advantage of their innocence and rob them of their trust. My anger grew as I thought about how these young children, taught by their parent’s love to feel secure around others in authority, are to be subjected to a dictatorial federal system that has been transformed away from teaching basic academics to one that instead, focuses on controlling and remolding the children’s minds.
These thoughts reminded me of a story I had read several decades before, written by Ayn Rand in her book entitled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. In the book, Rand included a story written in the nineteenth century by famed writer Victor Hugo. The story was called “The Comprachicos.” Hugo said the term was a compound Spanish word meaning “child-buyers.” The Comprachicos traded in children.
Hugo went on to describe why they bought and sold the children and how they prepared them for purchase. They created monsters. Why? To make people laugh. Kings in their courts needed to laugh. The people needed side shows to make them laugh. To fill the need, the Comprachicos created freaks.
The making of freaks for everyone’s pleasure became an art form. They had a talent to disfigure. They operated to change faces into hideous masks. As Hugo described it, the process was a sort of “reverse orthopedics”: “Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint.” Worse, the Comprachicos became masters at erasing the child’s memory so that they had no recollection of a life before they were horribly disfigured. “Was it not always so?”
Later, in China, the process became more perfected as they learned to put the very young children in a box or a bottle so that as their little bodies grew, they grew into the shape of the container. The perfect freaks were created.
Now, why did I have such thoughts on this Halloween night? It wasn’t because of the costumes. Those were make-believe and a personal choice by the children. They were simply playing.
No, my thoughts of the Comprachicos were from the second half of Rand’s article when she made her point in the telling of the Hugo story. She saw, as I see now, that the Comprachicos of our day are found in the public school classrooms. Only today, they don’t physically deform the children.
Today the education system is designed to deform the children’s minds. In this way, these modern-day Comprachicos are much more dangerous and evil than those Hugo wrote about. It’s much more difficult to see the immediate results of the deformity. Many, even the parents, find it nearly impossible to see the destruction that is occurring. And so the Comprachicos can work out in the open in complete secrecy.
Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, is one of the nation’s leading experts on Agenda 21 and its assault on property rights and personal freedom. He is author of the book “Now Tell Me I was Wrong” and editor of the monthly newsletter The DeWeese Report. For more information visit www.americanpolicy.org.
This article was originally published at ConservativeHQ.com. Used with permission.
