Responsible people take matters into their own hands and build states – at whatever cost. Then, they grow irresponsible and lose their countries. Historically, growing irresponsibility was related to affluence: people, safe and economically secure, distance themselves from the issues of statehood. They can afford the politicians’ occasional mistakes and don’t bother discharging their main duty as citizens: controlling the state. The recent decades saw a new road toward civil irresponsibility: ultra-long mass education.
Israel, like the early Communist Empire, uses schools to brainwash children who learn every Communist value from militant atheism to jingoism to sexual permissiveness. The last is especially important: both Israeli and Russian communists realized that sexual immorality (absence of restraints) is the surest way to destroy the traditional morality.
People used to work from childhood; they were responsible for their livelihood. The twelve-year school education changed that behavioral pattern. Eighteen-year-old adults are utterly irresponsible; they lack meaningful responsibilities. School education is about learning rather than questioning, and young adults grow subservient to authorities, used to accepting authoritative pronouncements unquestioningly. Secular school graduates obey government decisions and go to wars without a second thought; yeshiva students similarly accept rabbinical authority and participate in violent protests. Both groups are subservient to their masters. Ignorant Russian peasants rose up against tsar, but educated Jews accept the government surrendering Israeli depth of defense to Arab enemies and partitioning Jerusalem with Palestinian fedayeen. Ignorant Palestinians disregard Jewish aspirations, educated Jews are considerate of Palestinian aspirations; where’s the compromise?
School education is wasteful. Students learn the things they will never need, and do so slowly. Schools are nearly useless as a way of professional orientation. Not only twelve-year-long orientation is absurd, but most pupils choose future occupations randomly, based on extraneous circumstances. School rarely makes them realize their professional predisposition. A decision to become a doctor or lawyer is unrelated to anything the person studied in school. On other hand, Aristotle realized that he wants to be a philosopher and Newton – physicist without going to high school.
Jewish learning was famously practical and so good that it allowed the Jews to over-achieve every other nation on earth in terms of intellectual productivity. Start reading and memorizing at three to five years, learn writing shortly afterwards – and then go choose a profession for yourself, all the while continuing work and Torah studies. Unlike bad yeshivas today, traditional Jewish educators taught children to think, analyze complex issues on religious examples. Students of Torah were prepared for every occupation.
Socialist ideas distorted societies. People used to work all their lives, but now the idea of 70- or 12-year-olds at work is anathema. Is it any better to waste time with computer games and TV? Children’s energy, now wasted, can be used for work. Twelve-year-olds can work few hours a day in cafes, fields – on many jobs. Still more suitably, they can engage in professional education, study in universities. They can marry at fifteen rather than thirty-five. Young people can live normal, full-fledged lives instead of being pressed into infantile existence.
But governments need irresponsible citizens, and welcome infantilism.
