The headmaster deplored contemporary education, with its emphasis on the written word, which tended to atrophy a child’s sensual perception of nature and intuitive receptiveness to the still small voice of God, which is inspiration.

It was the poet Basho who wrote:

Listen! a frog
Jumping into the silence
Of an ancient pond

Yet the phenomenon of a frog jumping into a pond must have been seen by many others. Down through the ages and in the whole world, Watt and Newton cannot have been the only ones to notice the steam from a boiling kettle or observe an apple fall.

Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster. (pp. 79-81)

How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

Hitler

According to Ben in “The Wave”, less than 10 percent of Germans at that time participated in the Nazi Party. It clearly shows that all the people’s consent is the least necessary to rule the world. For a privileged few, in addition, this is too bulky or too annoying to rule the world. Rather, what the minority power holder needs is an effort to inculcate the majority of people with respect and terror for the absolute power or to make them mentally or physically apathetic. The Wave describes how the power is seized and how it controls the people.

“You would have put on the uniforms, turned your heads, and allowed your friends and neighbors to be persecuted and destroyed. You say it could never happen again, but look how close you came. Threatening those who wouldn’t join you, preventing non-Wave members from sitting with you at football games. Fascism isn’t something those other people do of us. You ask how could the German people do nothing as millions of innocent human beings were murdered? How could they claim they weren’t involved? What causes people to deny their own histories?”

. . . “If history repeats itself, you will all want to deny what happened to you in The Wave. But if our experiment has been successful - and I think you can see that it has - you will have learned that we are all responsible for our own actions, and that you must always question what you do rather than blindly follow a leader, and that for the rest of our lives, you will never, ever allow a group’s will to usurp your individual rights.” (p. 135)

The Wave: The Classroom Experiment That Went Too Far
Todd Strasser

Just like a conversation with B and D at Cream, English can neither be an international language for all the people in the planet nor a yardstick to measure one’s intellectuality or stupidity. Please keep it in mind that English is just an instrument to communicate to each other. Nothing more than that.

Knowledge is practice. There is nothing extraordinary about the knowledge stored up only in brain as compared with the junk foods being spoiled in the refrigerator.

J가 메신저 들어오더니, 갑자기 “여기는 한국입니다”를 영어로 뭐냐고 물어본다. 만 4살된 아들녀석 영어를 가르친단다. 그 녀석하는 말이 - 여느 부모와 다름없이 - 우리 아들 한국어는 다 끝냈고, 동화책 술술 읽고, 이해 다 하고, 이제 영어 공부할 차례라고 한다. 60만원짜리 튼튼영어도 준비해서 가르친단다. 그러면서, 자신의 발음이 아이의 발음을 망칠까봐 두렵다고 한다. 하루종일 아이는 자신이 무엇을 하는지도 모른 채, 카세트 테잎에서 흘러나오는 이야기들을 따라 할 것이다. 부모의 거침없이 쏟아지는 칭찬을 받으면서 말이다.

무엇을 위하여 이 아이들은 영어를 이런 엿같은 방법으로 배워야 하는지 묻고 싶다. 그 근원이야 많겠지만, 부모들의 잘못된 경쟁심리, 자존심, 혹은 자녀에 대한 헛된 기대심리 또한 그 가운데 하나임에 틀림없다.