Children are naturally and innately thirsty for learning and enter this world with a deep, instinctive desire to learn. In my view, one of the greatest functions of compulsory education is to kill and destroy this natural desire for learning.

The task of education in its present structure is not to cultivate children who rely upon their unique talents, love learning and develop their learning along the path of individuation. Its task, instead, is to turn children into the small and large, uniform and ultimately identical cogs of a great machine called society.

All the beliefs, prejudices, judgements and preconceptions of tradition and ideology that have contaminated the mental world of adults must be embodied in compulsory education so that children become not independent thinkers but manageable products who sustain the survival of the system of thought that created and enslaved them.

The first task of education is to guarantee that children do not think independently. The teachers desired by such a system must be as small as the content they are required to teach, and the task of the educational organisation is to exercise a power through which obedience to the command not to think is learned and accepted from the beginning, until we ourselves come to fear thought and regard anyone who has begun to think as an enemy.

True education teaches children how to think, not what to think. Such an education does not see children’s minds as vessels to be filled with content desired by structures of power, but as candles to be lit so that they may illuminate through their own inner capacities and strength.

Aydin Areta