The Comprachicos – The Chilling “Our Killing Schools” Version

Note to readers: The promised article about the SECURE Act 2.0 will have to wait as I found C. Bradley Thompson’s 3-part series on “The Killing Schools” deserving a commentary and a larger audience. I’ll be back with another installment of the book next week, diving into more details on the virtues of capitalism. I finished recording the audio book the past weekend and it’s being edited as we speak. I hope to have it up on Audible in early August.

In 1971, Ayn Rand published the essay The Comprachicos in her collection The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (reprinted in 1998 in The Return of The Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution). She got the title of the essay from Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs, where he describes the Comprachicos and their metier:

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 need 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 …

(Rand’s translation)

This quote sets the stage for the essay, which is an indictment of Progressive education, likening its educators to Comprachicos of the mind; Using a toxic mix of Progressive ideology and pedagogy as their torture mechanism, they stultify and distort the minds, not the bodies, of children, adolescents, and young adults from preschool through college.

C. Bradley Thompson, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. In his three part essay, “The Killing Schools” published on his substack, The Redneck Intellectual (part 1, part 2, and part 3), he takes a similar approach to Rand when analyzing the tragic phenomenon of school shootings that we’ve experienced the past 25 years. Like Ayn Rand in the Comprachicos, Thompson explains that Progressive education is at fault. It is the most insightful and chilling account of the fundamental causes of juvenile mass murder that I’ve encountered. In “Our Killing Schools—Part 1,” Thompson reviews

…the history of mass shootings at America’s government schools over the last quarter century and … [raises] the most important question unasked by virtually all liberals and conservatives: why are America’s teenage boys committing mass murder across the nation in our government schools? … [He raises] the terrifying possibility that these boys are attacking the schools as the source of their suffering and everything they hate.

In part 2, Progressive Education and Our Killing Schools,” he identifies and explains what he considers to be

…the philosophic root cause of America’s school shootings: the theory and practice of Progressive education. … [He focuses], first, on the role played by Progressive theories of education in promoting cognitive confusion in the minds of children (boys in particular); and second, on how Progressive education promotes moral and psychological chaos in the lives of American children.

In part 3, Nihilism and Our Killing Schools, building his case much like Rand did 50 years ago, and supported by a wealth of examples from the past 25 years, he takes us through the education of a future shooter from preschool until he pulls the trigger. He convincingly demonstrates that Progressive education breeds moral nihilism in these boys; in fact that moral nihilism is the inevitable outcome of progressive education:

The problem with [Columbine shooters] Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and America’s other juvenile mass murderers is that their artificially inflated self-images, grounded in causeless feelings and nurtured by a kind of infantile wish-fulfillment, eventually had to confront an objective reality different from the fantasy world created by themselves and nurtured by their teachers. As they left the controlled environment of their elementary schools where every child is a winner, they entered the nasty and brutish Hobbesean world of the American high school that immediately divides into a rigid class system of winners and losers. They were the losers, and that fact (as they experienced it) unleashed their untethered hatred. They targeted for indiscriminate death and destruction the place and source of all their anger and despair.

How do we address the problem? Thompson argues that Progressive education can’t be abolished because it’s entrenched in the nation’s public “ed” schools, that is, the public universities that train the vast majority of our teachers. The only way of purging our education system of Progressive influences is to abandon the government (public) K-12 schools. He ends with presenting us with an ultimatum: either choose the physical, psychological, intellectual and moral wellbeing of our children, or choose to continue supporting the government school system and all it entails. We can’t have both.

In Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right: A 21st Century Citizen Guide, I describe the moral groundswell that must be set in motion for Americans to realize that today’s immoral, individual rights violating government (public) education system has to be abolished. In practice, this means separating state and education, removing all government production, financing and regulation of education. Abolition is the only course of action that will (1) restore the rights of educators and educational entrepreneurs to pursue non-Progressive educational solutions where human nature is the guiding light, not detached-from-reality Progressive pedagogy, and (2) restore the rights of parents to follow their values and wallets in choosing the best education available for their children among those solutions. C. Bradley Thompson, and Ayn Rand before him, make critical contributions to creating this moral groundswell.

Read The Comprachicos, and marvel at Rand’s epistemological and psychological analysis of the distortion of the minds of the young as they are shepherded through the Progressive education system. And ponder the frightening fact that, apart from the home-school movement, our education system has only got worse in the 50 years since she wrote it.

Read C. Bradley Thompsons 21st century “sequel” (part 1, part 2, and part 3) for critical insights into the mind of a school shooter, and get used to the fact that abolition of government (public) education is the only viable long-term remedy.

And read my book and check out the From Here To There section on the Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right website for policy suggestions that will move us towards abolition once the critical mass of public moral support has been reached.

Finally, share and promote all of the above widely to do your part in setting the moral groundswell in motion.