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The Comprachicos were a 17th Century group of Gypsies whose name means the "child buyers." They gained notoriety in Victor Hugo's 1869 story "The Man Who Laughs," made into a movie in 1928 starring Conrad Veidt in the role of Gwynplaine, a boy disfigured by the Comprachicos...
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These "freaks" were purposely disfigured for the purpose of amusement, either in side shows or as court jesters. Often to achieve their purpose, the same techniques used in bonsai were used.
In 1970 Ayn Rand wrote the Comprachicos names after Hugo's story, however, the deformities inflicted by the New Comprachicos were of a mental rather than physical variety- the New Comprachicos, you see are educators. Where the Comprachicos of old disfigured the child's body or face, the New Comprachicos disfigure the mind. To achieve optimum effect, the disfigurement must begin at an early age: "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."
Contrary to what progressive educators believe, it is between the ages of 3-7 that a child develops the contextual framework through which they will process information for the rest of their lives. It's up to the adults in the child's environment to nurture their curiosity and natural thirst for knowledge- although they are as yet unable to recognize ir articulate it as such. Progressives choose to stultify this innate desire through "play" and other exercises designed to impede or destroy it altogether. One such nurturing environments is the Montessori method, according to Rand:
"Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook indicates the nature and extent of the help that a child needs at the time he enters nursery school. He has learned to identify objects; he has not learned to abstract attributes, i.e., consciously to identify things such as height, weight, color or number. He has barely acquired the ability to speak; he is not yet able to grasp the nature of this, to him, amazing skill, and he needs training in its proper use (i.e., training in conceptualization). It is psycho-epistemological training that Dr. Montessori had in mind (though this is not her term), when she wrote the following about her method:
“The didactic material, in fact, does not offer to the child the ‘content’ of the mind, but the order for that ‘content.’... The mind has formed itself by a special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying.
“The mental attitude acquired by such an exercise leads the child to make ordered
observations in his environment, observations which prove as interesting to him as
discoveries, and so stimulate him to multiply them indefinitely and to form in his mind a
rich ‘content’ of clear ideas. "
Rand's criticism of Progressive education, from beginning through high school is concise and damning, in effect destroying the icons of Progressivism as thoroughly as they destroy children... "If you want to see hatred, do not look at wars or concentration camps – these are merely its consequences. Look at the writings of Kant, Dewey, Marcuse and their followers to see pure hatred." And rightly so, the "purpose" of Progressivism is to indoctrinate a new army of humanists to aid the Progressive attack on America and the values that they so despise... the values that made her strong.
"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). No better method than this type of grading could be devised to destroy a child’s individuality and turn him into a stale little conformist, to stunt his unformed sense of personal identity and make him blend into an anonymous mob, to penalize the best, the most intelligent and honest children in the class, and to reward the worst, the dull, the lethargic, the dishonest."
Rand goes on to describe the curriculum... "As to the content of the courses in the grade and high schools, the anti-rational indoctrination is carried on in the form of slanted, distorted material, of mystic-altruist collectivist slogans, of propaganda for the supremacy of emotions over reason—but this is merely a process of cashing in on the devastation wrought in the children’s psycho-epistemology. Most of the students do graduate as full-fledged little collectivists, reciting the appropriate dogma, but one cannot say that this represents their convictions. The truth is much worse than that: they are incapable of holding any convictions of any kind, and they gravitate to collectivism because that is what they have memorized—and also because one does not turn to reason and independence out of fear, helplessness and self-doubt."
The question naturally arises, why would anyone want to to such things to a child? What they purposely do to a child's future, denying them the ability to think critically is little better than the psychological damage done by a pedophile... perhaps worse. Ayn Rand asks the same question: "Why? What is the comprachicos’ motive?"
"To paraphrase Victor Hugo:" “And what did they make of these children? Monsters.
Why monsters? To rule.”
Power is the name of the game. Rulers (political elites) don't want subjects that think critically... people like that ask questions. Questions must be answered or the ruler's grasp on power is lost. "Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product — truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother."
I'll leave you with this: "What brings a human being to the state of a comprachico? Self loathing. The degree of a man’s hatred for reason is the measure of his hatred for himself.)
A comprachico leader does not aspire to the role of political dictator. He leaves it to his heir: the mindless brute. The comprachicos are not concerned with establishing anything. The obliteration of reason is their single passion and goal. What comes afterward has no reality to them; dimly, they fancy themselves as the masters who will pull the strings behind the ruler’s throne: the brute, they feel, will need them. (That they end up as terrorized bootlickers at the brute’s court and at his mercy, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, is merely an instance of reality’s justice.)"
Liberty and freedom lie in critical thought- or exist because of it... that's why it's anathema to the Comprachicos and the "mindless brutes." There is a war going on, being fought on the battleground of the mind... Your children are the prize. Teach them before the state gets their hands on them, or better yet, homeschool. The Cultural Marxists can only win is they have subsequent generations of "soldiers" unable to think for themselves. Question authority... ask questions...
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/RandAyn-The-Comprachicos.pdf
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/04/k12_how_our_schools_make_monsters.html
