Normalization Through School Dicipline, Educational Indoctrination and Standardized Testing, Breeds Public Indifference and Promotes War Criminals to the Highest Levels of Power

Well, assessing the legacy … It seems to me one things which we should be thinking about, is that [Vietnam war architect, Robert] McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give back to you and remember. That’s what MacNamara was good at. He was bright and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks questions, “Is this right? Is it wrong?” [Howard Zinn]