Odor

At the age of sixteen, a blind French teenager named Jacques Lusseyran became head of an underground resistance group of 600 during WWII. Lusseyran arranged dynamiting, assassinations, and other violent forms of sabotage to free his country from the Germans, a story told in his autobiography, And Then There Was Light. In chapter four, he talked about his early schooling, calling the classroom experience a moral disaster:


... there is such a thing as moral odor and that was the case at school. A group of human beings that stay in one room by compulsion begins to smell. That is literally the case, and with children it happens even faster. Just think how much suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by boys between the ages of ten and fourteen ...


Lusseyran was able to murder large numbers of men just a few months after he left school "where the world of reality with all its real moral questions was entirely lacking. " We become what we behold. It's something to remember, Columbine.


--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 99 - 100