The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all.

Hear the piercing words of Tom Robbins, a writer who clothed his truths in strange garments yet spoke with the force of a prophet: “The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.” This is not the gentle sigh of a teacher, but the roar of one who sees corruption in what should be pure. He declares that what we call education is but a shadow of its true purpose, reduced to fear, conformity, and servitude.

The ancients knew that true education is not the stuffing of facts into young minds but the shaping of souls. Socrates did not drill his students for labor; he awakened them to question, to wonder, to seek wisdom. Plato’s Academy was not a factory, but a garden where the soul grew toward truth and virtue. Robbins mourns that this vision has been betrayed—that instead of cultivating thinkers and seekers, we forge obedient workers, cogs in a vast machine whose only aim is profit.

Consider the industrial age, when children were pulled from fields into factories. Their bodies were bent, their spirits crushed, their lives reduced to production. Reformers rose to demand schools, hoping to lift children from servitude into freedom. Yet Robbins laments that the spirit of the factory has invaded the school itself—that now, though children sit in classrooms instead of factories, the training is still the same: obedience, repetition, conformity. The machine has shifted shape, but the cogs remain.

History offers us warning. In Nazi Germany, schools became engines of propaganda. Instead of teaching children to think, they trained them to obey, to repeat slogans, to become soldiers of an ideology. The result was a generation led into destruction. Robbins’s words carry this echo: whenever education is sacrificed to conformity, whenever curiosity is chained and minds are narrowed, danger follows. The price of failing to nourish free thought is always tyranny, whether of politics, of commerce, or of religion.

Yet his cry is not only condemnation but a call to remember what education truly is. It is to awaken curiosity, to kindle imagination, to set the mind aflame with wonder. It is to teach children not what to think, but how to think. To give them courage to question lies, to pursue wisdom, to honor truth. Only then do we shape not cogs, but creators; not servants of commerce, but stewards of humanity.

The lesson, then, is this: guard the sacred task of education. Parents, teachers, leaders—do not settle for training children to fit a system. Inspire them to seek, to dream, to challenge. Give them stories of the past, tools for the present, and visions for the future. Protect them from fear, from prejudice, from hollow doctrines that shrink the soul. For every child is not a cog, but a seed of infinite potential.

Therefore, let this teaching be sealed upon your heart: the brutal truth is that we betray the young when we reduce them to gears in the wheels of commerce. But the greater truth is that we can choose another way. Teach with love, lead with wisdom, free the young from fear, and nourish their minds with wonder. In this lies the hope of the future—not in obedient workers, but in awakened souls who will carry the light of truth into the world.