How Schools Gave Us Today’s “Mob Mentality” (Ayn Rand)

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.
— Ayn Rand, from her essay “The Comprachicos” Published in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1970.
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