Consumption

Far from production as an ideal, it was consumption that had to be encouraged. School had to train in consumption habits: listening to others, moving on a bell or horn signal without questioning, becoming impressionable - more accurately, gullible - in order to do well on tests. Kids who insisted on producing their own lives had to be humiliated publicly as a warning to others.

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 44