Question: [same speaker] One more question. Now, as far as education is concerned: It's been a while since I was in high school. And, when I went to high school, I went to Walter High School in the Bronx, and I had to go through a metal detector, a wand and an X-ray machine, to get into the school: That's just to get upstairs. Now, I haven't been there for 8-9 years, so I don't know what they're doing now [LaRouche laughs]. My next question is, based on knowing the facts that our education system is failing the youth, how can we, as community, using a community effort, help educate our youth, without trying to steer them into having a kind of individualistic type of ideology, or idea of how things should be done?

LaRouche: Exactly. Existentialism is the problem. The point is this: We're not educating our youth in the first place. The schools are a fraud. That's the problem. You see, for a child, in a healthy school, I think most of us had some exposure to a classroom situation, which we would consider relatively healthy. A good teacher, a good class: something better than the rest of it. Eh? Something you enjoyed, because there was a real interplay of ideas, in a productive and meaningful way.

Now, this is always true with young children, as much as it is, with other children. Of course, we have problems today, because of what's happened to family relations and culture; because of video games and other things, we have systemically destroyed young people--even at a very early age. For example, the damned television set, the video games. These things have knowable effects upon the mind of the child, that you can permanently destroy the child.

See a child, a human goes through a certain period of maturation, which, I talk about youth movement, but I bring this in, always, as you may have noticed: You have various levels. As you know about adolescence--you've all seen an adolescent; once you were one--and you know, that we classify anybody who's over 18-25, if they behave like an adolescent, we diagnose them as clinically insane. But, if they're adolescent, we say, "that's normal adolescence." Because they're in the process of biological and other maturation of the developing individual. There are phases of development, which are variable from individual to individual, but there're types of development, which are rather consistent.

Absolute infancy: purblindness in an infant. We have not explored the effect of violence in a family, on a fetus. Remember, a six-month premie--a fetus born after six months' term, of nine--if it survives the lung hazard and other hazards of that premature birth (which we can generally deal with in hospitals, today; I mean, premies can be dealt with, so that the danger, deaths because of lung problems, immature lungs, can be avoided); these premies when successfully treated, will grow up to be normal children, and normal adolescents and adults. Normal in other ways. Well, if that's the case, then what's going on with the six to nine months part of the term, of the one who comes out at nine months? That little thing in there, is hearing everything that's going on! Maybe not in terms of understanding, with a dictionary, but emotionally, in terms of emotional reactions and emotional stereotypes, this little thing in there, is getting a sense of what's happening outside the womb.

In the same sense that a human being, with sense-perception, is capable of looking beyond sense-perception to the reality beyond, so the little creature inside the womb, has a certain implicit human potential, for access to insight into outside the womb. So, if there's beating in the family, if there's fear, screaming, anxiety, this poor little critter in there, is suffering that. And maybe, when their delivered, when they come out, after a nine-month term, maybe they've gone through all this stuff. If they're fully human in characteristics, at the age of six months in term, you mean they can't respond to what's going on outside the womb, during three months later?

So, therefore the kind of environment you create in households, in society, around children, in pregnancy, which are not totally incognita, but they are terra incognita in large degree, something which is not taken into account.

So, you have the age of the fetal child--that's a human being in there. The age of six months, it's a fully qualified human being. Why, because if they're born at six months, they're fully qualified human beings. They have a little health problem, but otherwise they're human. We don't recommend six months' delivery, but, it happens, and if it happens, we can make a success of it, in any cases.

All right, now what do you look at, in terms of the infant who has been born? There are developmental problems: purblindness, other kinds of developmental problems. There are syndromes of young children at various age intervals. Educational systems were developed, on the basis of the average capability--good educational systems--of the average ability of children to adapt to certain challenges of knowledge and social relations, at these age intervals.

Adolescence, between being a child and becoming an adult, is a crisis for most people, in which some will go insane. Sometimes insanity is called adolescence; it's continued it's called insanity!

Then you have your age, 18-25 interval, primarily. Which is the difference of youth. This is a process of transition, into becoming full-fledged adults, in terms of assuming responsibility. Your major concern is, emotionally, to go through a development, including education, which qualifies you to function as a fully-fledged adult, at the age of 25 and beyond; with some professional potential, as well. So, you'll feel like you're a full-status human being, adult human being. Maybe you do not know everything, but at least you're qualified. And, that gives you a sense of emotional maturity and satisfaction, which is a change of state of the way you can think about society. You're not anxious about things, that you would be anxious about, as an adolescent. You feel differently.

So, in organizing society, we have to take these kinds of things into consideration.

Now, the basic thing we require, fundamentally, in response to the focal point of your question, is, we require an educational system, which is actually an educational system: which educates people in ideas. That can be done. If we stop trying to rehearse people, to pass pre-programmed, multi-choice questionnaires, which are computer-scored, and then downgrade the quality of the questionnaires to fit the capacity of the students--the sliding scale--and come up by trying to adjust the sliding scale down, faster than the people are becoming stupid--and that's when we say, there's an improvement in education, by virtue of test scores. Eh?

So, the point is, what you're doing with children, particularly with this Ritalin spread in school, what you are doing with children is, you are boring them to death! You're torturing them! To have some poor kid sit there, and have to go through this garbage, this rehearsal, this boring game, with no emotional excitement in education: it's torture! And you put 'em in a society, where you tell 'em there's no future, you tell them a lot of lies, like the popular lies today; you give them a total pessimism about society. You tell 'em: "Eh! Eh!" "Eh! Whaddya think you are, eh? You're nothing! You're like the rest of us! You're nothing! Where d'ya think you're going? You're going nowhere!" "Take this stuff. Fix yer head, feel better. You may feel worse in the morning, but then, take another one."

We're doing that to them! If we have an educational system, which is based on love of human beings, and, say: To love a human being, is to love that in a person, which is a human being: the capacity to know; t communicate knowledge; to be part of society; to have a sense of being part of history; a sense of influencing the future of history. Then, they're happy! I've seen this: They're happy! Young children, who are properly educated, unless they have severe problems which are exogenous to the educational system, will tend to be happy with a good education. I was. I had a lot of bad teachers, bad courses, I wasn't too happy with them. I was happy to torment them. But, whenever you had a good teacher, a good course, where actual ideas were presented, where you came out knowing more about yourself, your own mind, and your own powers, you didn't want to go away from it. You always would try, if you could pick your courses, you would want to pick a course with these kinds of things, not because it was your specialty, but because you enjoyed it! Because it was stimulating you with ideas. For example: We had one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th Century, was chosen because he was qualified in Classical Greek. And an insightful professor said, since you're qualified in philology, in Classical Greek, you're qualified to teach calculus next year. And he was. One of the best.

And therefore, a good education, based on any such consideration, which makes people happy, with the experience of developing their own minds, is what is generally required. If you have that, if you have that kind of school setting, with some protective elements added, against violence--and you can't tolerate violence against kids. Children must not be exposed to violence. You must intervene, actively, to protect children from violence. It has terrible effects on the child, at all age groups. Don't allow it! You must enforce that. And no kidding. No kidding, you must protect the children. You're not going to "tough them up" by subjecting them to violence. You're going to enrage them and destroy them, by subjecting them to violence. We have to protect children. And we have to have an educational approach, which thinks in these kinds of terms. In that case, we can manage the problems.

But, remember, you have a society, which is going nowhere. You have a society, which tells you it's going nowhere. All of you know what we means by a "no future" generation. The future that was dumped on you, by the past generation, which were neglected. These children are subjected to a worse degree of the same problem. They're in a no-future generation--worse off than most of you. Most of you here, have some sense, some claim on sense of intellectual identity and security. So therefore, you, in a sense, are better off, by far, than these poor kids. Often, these poor kids are sitting there, living in a literal Hell, wondering whether they're going to be killed; having no place to go, where they feel secure, important, or have identity. And society says, "We don't care." And that message gets across. [applause]

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