As per Brunnen-G's request to read some more replies to this subject, I have an Even More Modest Proposal...

On December 10, 1999 at 17:32:43, unipeg noted:

"It is a well-established psychological fact that when people, and specifically teenagers, are faced with something they are forbidden to do, they will attempt to do it. ... Therefore, The easiest way to [rid our society of destructive paths] would be to create school curriculum that centered around these issues. By making all knowledge concerning these subjects easily available, they will no longer be taboo, and therefore no one will feel the need to go against normality. If children are indoctrinated in [sex and violence] from an early age, the subjects would be normal to them. Teaching should begin at a very young age, preferably in the first year of school."

Ah, the most excellent irony of it all. Quite true. But why stop there, unipeg? Training in sex/nudity and violence is not *nearly* enough for a well-rounded student. What you need to develop is a universal curricula of COMPLEX HEDONISM for the Career-minded. So in addition to unipeg's suggestions, we ought to teach full courses in Obsenity, Character Assassination, and Drug-and-Alcoholic Appreciation; plus emphasize the Joys of Seminal Theft, Forgery and Conmanship; Bankruptcy and Recovery in Business (so that the student can get on with better things in life); and let's not forget Final Theses in World Dictatorship. Graduates of this "School of Scandal" will have acquired such a thorough grounding in the techniques of falsification, depravity, and conmanship, that they will not be easily deceived by anyone in the world.

Thus the well-educated student will experience the full, violent powerlust of the crime-lord mentality. He will also know the satiated sensibilities of a pleasure-seeking sybarite. More importantly, he will have learned the relative unimportance -- and utter tedium -- of such approaches since everyone else knows it too. By the end of his schooling, we can rest assured that the student has become a sophisticated social genius with a craving to be a simple saint; the latter ought to reduce his incidence of lawbreaking to near zero. Heh.

Wolf "I blame Dr.Seuss and Lafferty for this outbreak of Education rabble-rousery" spirit