VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 6

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 6

The School Is a Prison: Hold People Safely, Then Find the Ones Who Can Get Things Done

The last section told you that character is the one medicine for the sickness of torment, and that this medicine has to be handed down by real people, one generation at a time. This section tells you that to brew this medicine, to hand it down, to get people safely settled, you need a place. That place is the school. But the moment I open my mouth I have to say a thing that will probably startle you. The true, number one job of a school is not teaching, and it is not turning out grades. It is to hold people safely, the way a prison holds people.

This is not an insult to the school. It is me putting in front of you the plainest, most important thing a school does, the thing almost no one is willing to look at straight.

Think it through, calmly. How does a school actually run? A crowd of children, every morning at a fixed hour, are sent inside. There are walls around them, bells ordering them, someone keeping watch, no running loose. And at a fixed hour, they are let out. Picture that, and now ask, what other place does it look like? You gather a crowd of people into one place with walls, a schedule, and someone minding them, in at a set time, out at a set time, no wandering off in between. Yes. It looks like a place that holds people safely. It looks like a prison.

A school's number one true job is the same as that of a prison. To take a crowd of people and settle them, all in one place, watched, minded, not scattered out in the streets getting into trouble. Put plainer still, a school's number one job is custodial protection. It is settling. It is heading off trouble. Think about it. In a family, both parents have to go out and work for the wages their labor earns. The six-year-old, the ten-year-old at home, who watches them? No one. A child, bursting with energy, character not yet set, loose on the street all day with no one minding him, what might come of that? So society built schools, to take this whole crowd of children and settle them together by day, with someone watching, with food to eat, with a place to be, so that the parents can go out and work with their minds at ease. This is a school's number one, most solid service. It catches a whole generation of children and holds them safely.

But today, the people up top who design the education system have forgotten this number one job. They have dropped it. In their eyes, the number one job of a school has become turning out grades. Test scores, rankings, the rate into good colleges. Whether a school is any good, they judge by how many high scores it produced, how many children it sent into famous schools. And the truly most important job of a school, to settle the children well and to raise them into people of high character, gets shoved off into the corner, and no one takes it seriously anymore. This is the first and most basic error in today's education. They took the secondary thing for the number one thing, and dropped the real number one thing. How this one inversion threw the whole of education into chaos, the next section takes up in detail. For this section, hold this one thing in your mind. A school's true number one job is to be a prison, to settle them, to keep them, to catch a whole generation steadily, and in that safely settled place, to raise them into people of character. Grades come after. Grades are the secondary thing.

Get this number one job set right, and then turn it toward a place you probably never thought to turn it, and it becomes an enormous thing in the age of this great AI turning.

Cast your mind back to the first chapter. This wave of AI came, and a great mass of grown adults lost their jobs, let out of that prison called work. The first chapter told them, this is being let out, this is a good thing, and it let them breathe out. But once that breath is out, a new hardship comes right behind it. This whole mass of adults has suddenly fallen idle.

People cannot sit idle. A person who has always had a place to go, work to do, something to aim at, suddenly has nowhere to go, nothing to do, and wakes each morning not knowing what to do with himself. This kind of idleness grinds a person down. Idle too long and the heart starts to panic. Panicked too long and trouble comes. Look back at the second chapter of the first volume, at that old script from the first three times a machine replaced people. The machine roars, a great mass of people fall idle, with no food and nowhere to go, and they panic, and they burn, and they come out to grab from the ones nearby who still have something. And the grabbing brings chaos, and the chaos frightens the ones afraid of being robbed, and they find a way to ship this mass of idle people off to war, to burn each other up. A hundred and forty million people fell that way.

So how to settle this great mass of let-out, idle adults, so that they do not panic, do not riot, do not come out to grab, this is an enormous thing in the age of this great AI turning. And the method here is plain. Bring them, too, into the courtyard of the school.

How? The readiest road of all is to let the unemployed parents go into their own children's schools, and sit in alongside them. Picture it. The child is in class, and the father, the mother, out of work, who would otherwise be sitting at home churning with worry, now comes into this courtyard too. He can keep his child company. He can sit down in the classroom himself and learn something again, patch up the truths of being a person that he never fully learned back when. A school that used to settle only the children now settles the children's parents along with them.

And this one move sets several things smooth at once. The first, this great mass of unemployed adults now has a place to go. A destination every day, a settling, and the heart no longer panics. Not panicking, they do not idle their way into trouble, do not come out to grab, do not get swept into that old script of being shipped off to war. That thousand-year road of blood from the first volume, right here, breaks off a stretch. The ground under a stable society is steadied, just like that. The second, they are not idle in this courtyard. They are receiving an education again, and what they are patching up is exactly that medicine from the last section, character. A grown person who spent most of a lifetime in the prison of work, served a sentence of labor, run ragged, may never have had the time or the heart to think the truths of being a person all the way through. Now that he has fallen idle and entered this courtyard, he can settle his mind and patch it up again, benevolence, righteousness, good faith, filial love, integrity, courage, tormenting no one, and make it solid. There is no time in a life when it is too late to patch up one's character. And the third, and the most wonderful of all, adults and children in this same courtyard receiving character education together, is itself the finest handing down there is. A child who sees his own mother and father also earnestly working at becoming better people learns more from that than from a teacher saying it a hundred times over. That embodied example from the third section happens here, alive. The parents live it out for the children, the teachers live it out for everyone, and in one courtyard, character soaks down, layer into layer.

Someone will ask, run this many schools, bring this many adults in, where does the money come from, where does the room come from? Let me tell you. You do not have to build a new furnace. The resources that already exist are enough. The school buildings are already there, the teachers are already there, the desks and chairs are already there. Widen the scale a little, put the empty classrooms and the empty hours to use, run more classes for adults, and let the unemployed come in. A world with enough can afford these schools, can afford these adults coming in to be settled and re-taught. No worry about food, no worry about a place to be. This courtyard can catch them.

Now, this prison of a school, whose number one job is to settle people, does not only settle people and raise their character. It is also a place from which the ones who should truly go and do great things can be chosen.

Look back at the first section of this chapter. Right at the start I told you a line. You who could carry the fire of the first volume all the way here, you are high in character and clear of sight, you are exactly the person who should be invited out to do great things, to replace the corrupt in office, to take part in making the rules and in governing. And back then you half believed it. You thought, that is easy to say, but by what right would it be me? How does the world pick out its people of high character and clear sight and send them out to do the work? That road is right here, in this courtyard.

Think about it. A courtyard takes in a great crowd of people, children and adults, all receiving character education together. This crowd stays a while, and as the days go on, what kind of person each one is begins to show. Who has clean hands and does not grab at small advantages. Who keeps his word, and does the thing he promised. Who reaches out a hand when someone is in trouble. Who dares to stand up and say a word when he sees something wrong. These things a single test paper cannot show. But in a courtyard where people live together, work together, learn together, over time, a person's character cannot stay hidden. Whether the character is real or put on, given enough time, all of it comes out.

And then the most natural, plainest thing in the world happens. Out of this great crowd, the ones highest in character and clearest of sight, seen by everyone, are chosen, layer by layer, lifted up and put forward to go and do greater things. This is no new gadget anyone invented. This is the very thing the ancestors did for thousands of years. A person of virtue first puts himself right. Having put himself right, he can keep a family in good order. The one who can keep a family in good order is invited out to see to the affairs of a district. The one who sees to a district well is invited out again, to see to something larger. Layer by layer, and what it rests on is character, real ability, and a name that everyone has seen with their own eyes, not the number on a test paper, and still less on backing, on scheming, on pushing others down.

And these people who are chosen, what do they go and do? They go and take the seats they were meant to sit in. The chapter on politics takes up, again and heavily, one thing. In the offices that run things today, the torment is at its worst, and the graft is staggering. There is a batch of people sitting in those seats whose hands are not clean, who have no ordinary people in their hearts, deadweight in office, some of them taking bribes and bending the law. What do we do with these people? Not catch them, drag them out, settle scores with them. This book, from beginning to end, has none of that. We invite them down, invite them into this courtyard, and like everyone else they patch up, from the beginning, that medicine called character, and remake themselves as people. A person whose hand reached the wrong way was not necessarily born bad. Most likely the medicine of character was never patched enough, or never patched right, back when. So let him come in and patch it. Patched, he is a usable person still.

And the seat he vacates, the one that used to be a fat post everyone scrambled and schemed for, who fills it now? The one chosen out of this courtyard, by character, by real ability, layer by layer. A person high in character, with clean hands, with ordinary people in his heart, sits down in the seat where things are run. And once he is in it, he naturally does not reach out his hand, naturally does not torment, naturally puts his whole heart into doing the work well, because that is simply the kind of person he is. This one exchange, out and in, gets an enormous thing done. The dirty-handed and the tormenting are invited down to be taught again. The clean-handed and the not-tormenting are invited up to do the work. And a courtyard for raising character turns, just like that, into a wellspring that feeds good people into society and cleanses the seats where things are run.

Now turn back once more to that line from the first section. You are high in character, you see clearly, you are exactly the person who should be invited out to do great things. You should understand now that it was no empty flattery. This courtyard, this road that picks people by character, was always meant to have a place for you. You carried the fire, you can sit still, you have come to see positions clearly. You are exactly the kind of person this courtyard should choose and send out. So sitting here reading this chapter is not to hear one lecture and then scatter. You are preparing for that great task ahead. The next section turns around and tells you how the education of today came to be wrecked, and by whom, and how.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.