Dr. Haim Ginott

My brother-in-law, a semi-retired Lt. Colonel in the Army Reserves, posted a powerful piece on his face book account, a quote from Dr. Haim Ginott, likely Jewish, a child psychologist and Holocaust survivor. The picture above it shows Hitler with his arm around a young boy in his Hitler youth uniform.

Ginott's quote: "I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education.

My request is: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters or skilled psychopaths. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human."

My mother was a remedial education teacher. My two sisters are speech pathologists. My nephew is a high school math teacher. My oldest brother is a brilliant, retired math professor, still devising original theorems. A love of intellectual investigation, independent think and reading widely were values brought to our farm kids by our parents.

I have serious reservations about the current education system, and the way that children are now taught, but I am not anti-education, formal or informal. How do we help children become good citizens, credentialed, and formally educated citizens, that would accept being imprisoned, tortured or killed by totalitarian overlords, rather than do to innocent victims what thousands of educated, sophisticated, worldly successful Germans did to the Jews last century under Hitler. Would educated American citizens today, if a Hitler came to power here--a putative or actual anti-Christ?

 I conjecture that our doctors, our nurses, our engineers, our tech school technicians like I am, our high school and our college graduates would do all the vicious things here, under totalitarian progroms, would inflict upon Jews, unswerving Christians, Mavellonialists, conservatives and individualists, that the Germans and Nazis committed against the Jews at Auschwitz. I theorize that we are all flawed sinners, naturally no better  or worse from our German ancestors, and that, if raised wrong and educated wrong, in their historical context, we would act about the same as they did. People are not smarter or no dumber, or no better or worse from generation to generation.

We must educate all children to be of good will, with the courage to stand by what is right, and refuse to what is wrong, no matter the worldly hurt suffered for so stand fast. If children are raised with bad wills, then their efforts could be canalized to serve the wicked ends of a monster like Hitler. If group pressure and totalitarian terror is brought to bear on a civilian population by fascist or communist overlords, a police state, then formally educated and degreed citizens would agree to do terrible things, as commanded by their governors. The individual wills of the private person is coalesced into a gigantic, aggregate, collective bad will. That is when gas chambers are a possiblity.

To bring up children of good will, of strong character, we must educate the heart as well as the head. Ethics and faith should taught in church and by the parents. Educators at school can teach children subject content, but civic virtues like obedience, respect for parents and authority, respect for the nation and the flag, a balance between rights entitled to and obligations as a citizens, taxpayer, soldier, and active political participant, must be taught.

Teachers should teach and inspire children to question, be skeptical, to balance personal interest and collective interest as a utilitarian personal assessment, to think for themselves. Children of good will that individual-live and individuate as well as group-live and seeks after popular affirmation, make reluctant little Nazis, educated monsters or skilled psychopaths.

As a radical individualist and maverizer, I have long criticized institutional living and huge, organizations to provide services. Modern children are ensnared from birth by TV cartoons, smart phones and iPads. Now the Left controls Academia and the public school system. Children believe what mainstream media and instructors and teachers brainwash them with and indoctrinate them with at every level of formal education. We are rearing educated Leftists, myrmidons to the socialist Ameritopia on the hill. These children have no self, no self-actualization, no individual-living to bring them up as supercitizens, self-actualized, defiant fighters, never willing to participate in or surrender to any murderous schemes by their in-place secret police state.

Professors are damaged, crippled souls. Despite their PHD degrees, they are brilliant, specialized educational bureaucrats, they run in packs and do articulate, stale groupthink. Being cogs in an institutional hierarchy, makes them selfless. They do not love themselves, but hate themselves because their self-love, their self-interest, their liberty, their independent thinking and their right-reasoning have been stripped from them. What is left is the shell of a human being hollowed out by the system that it now
 comes to love, serve and willingly perpetuate upon all society. Hoffer guides us here. Where millions of people, formally educated or not, or educated or not, so self-despise that they seek their holy cause to escape from freedom into, they are ripe to serve as eager Nazis building and operating gas chambers. It is collective man, institutionalized man, organizational man, group-oriented and group-living man, loyal to and subservient to the hierarchies to which he belongs, in a totalitarian society in which the government is God, is everywhere and controls everybody in their lives as outer persons and as inner persons.

If things go wrong in America or in any other socializing country, then totalitarian elites, with tens of millions of formally mis-educated people of all ages, could convert them to serve its mass movement projects like building gas chambers and starting world wars.