The Children Who Never Grow Up: How Progressive Education Creates Adult Dependents

We are producing generations who are allergic to responsibility but addicted to authority—as long as it’s someone else’s.

A Legacy of Deformation

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Ayn Rand’s 1970 essay The Comprachicos. For those who aren’t aware, the comprachicos were groups in European folklore said to deform children for use as beggars or curiosities. Methods included stunting growth, disfiguring faces, and malforming bones. The term, meaning "child-buyers," was coined by Victor Hugo in his 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs.​

Rand, a huge fan of Hugo’s, read the novel and saw an analogy of sorts to the Comprachicos in twentieth-century progressive educators. She called them the “Comprachicos of the mind” because rather than retarding the growth of children’s bodies, they’d retarded the growth of their minds. Now, over half a century later, as I try to understand the seemingly entrenched view—on both sides of the political aisle—that the government exists to take care of us, I can’t help but think she was right.

Of course I recommend you read the entire essay, but this is the part that comes to mind when I think about the phenomenon I’ve been observing that I want to write about today:

The production of monsters—helpless, twisted monsters whose normal development has been stunted—goes on all around us. But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler than their predecessors: they do not hide, they practice their trade in the open; they do not buy children, the children are delivered to them; they do not use sulphur or iron, they achieve their goal without ever laying a finger on their little victims.

The ancient comprachicos hid the operation, but displayed its results; their heirs have reversed the process: the operation is open, the results are invisible. In the past, this horrible surgery left traces on a child’s face, not in his mind. Today, it leaves traces in his mind, not on his face. In both cases, the child is not aware of the mutilation he has suffered. But today’s comprachicos do not use narcotic powders: they take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature had put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious.

This is the ingenuity practiced by most of today’s educators. They are the comprachicos of the mind.

They do not place a child into a vase to adjust his body to its contours. They place him into a “Progressive” nursery school to adjust him to society.

The Progressive nursery schools start a child’s education at the age of three. Their view of a child’s needs is militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual. A child of that age, they claim, is too young for cognitive training; his natural desire is not to learn, but to play. The development of his conceptual faculty, they claim, is an unnatural burden that should not be imposed on him; he should be free to act on his spontaneous urges and feelings in order to express his subconscious desires, hostilities and fears. The primary goal of a Progressive nursery school is “social adjustment”; this is to be achieved by means of group activities, in which a child is expected to develop both “self-expression’ (in the form of anything he might feel like doing) and conformity to the group.

From Nursery to Now: The Fallout of Progressive Pedagogy

Now before you recoil at the analogy she’s making – one I’m about to expand upon – consider the real meaning of “retardation” is “the act or process of delaying or impeding.”

While Rand specifically references the “nursery school” in the above passage, she goes on to explain what happens to graduates of the progressive nursery school when they move on to progressive “schooling” in grades K-12.

“The graduates of the Progressive nurseries are caught in the clash between their dazed, unfocused, whim-oriented psycho-epistemology and the demands of reality, with which they are not prepared to deal. They are expected to acquire some sort of formal knowledge, to pass exams, to achieve acceptable grades, i.e., to comply with some minimal factual norms—but, to them, it is a metaphysical betrayal. Facts are what they have been trained to ignore; facts cannot be learned by the kind of mental process they have automatized: by an animal-like method of catching the emotional cues emitted by the pack. The pack is still there, but it cannot help them at examination time—which they have to face in a state they have been taught to regard as evil: alone.

The panic of the conflict between their foggy subjectivism and the rudiments of objectivity left in the schools by a civilized past, leads to a nameless resentment in the minds of such children, to a wordless feeling that they are being unfairly imposed upon…”

It seems obvious to me the progressive “schooling” process Rand described in 1970 is still doing the same damage today. School lesson plans and curriculum materials emphasize group acceptance and obligation to the collective (inclusion, belonging, empathy, social justice), while the individual child’s progression from grade to grade and credentialing graduation depend upon their individual grades and test scores.

The Infantilized Mind in Public Life

Equally obvious (and odious) to me is the legacy of fifty-five years of progressive education, which is a huge population of chronological adults whose minds are so deformed by that “foggy subjectivism” and “nameless resentment” that our society is literally regressing as a whole. Racism, antisemitism, misogyny—these are real and ugly, but we now witness them being wielded not as challenges to be understood in historical, philosophical, or moral terms, but as vague emotional bludgeons by people who seem incapable of conceptual analysis. A college student demands safe spaces from opposing ideas. An employee files a complaint, not over a policy violation, but because a colleague’s tone made them “feel unsafe.” On social media, users call for someone’s job because they shared a meme that was “harmful,” even if they can’t articulate exactly why. In each case, there is the same psychological throughline: a refusal or inability to separate personal feeling from objective truth, coupled with the belief that someone else—be it an employer, institution, or the state—should step in to “fix it.” We appear to have educated a generation—or perhaps two—whose progressive schooling has — ironically — impeded their ability to progress beyond toddlerhood.

Concepts vs. Feelings: The Forgotten Tools of Thinking

This, to me, is the legacy of the modern comprachicos. Not physical deformity, but intellectual infantilization. People who reach adulthood still expecting the world to respond to their feelings the way a parent would, or should. People taught to express, not to reason. Taught to adjust, not to understand. Taught to conform, not to conceptualize. The end result is not just personal helplessness but civic paralysis. We are producing generations who are allergic to responsibility but addicted to authority—as long as it’s someone else’s.

Growing Up Requires Growing Minds

What we need now is a radical shift, not in political policy, but in educational philosophy. If we want to raise adults capable of independence, we must return to the foundations of a rational education: one that fosters conceptual thought, logical integration, and principled reasoning. One that respects the child’s potential not by coddling his feelings, but by challenging his mind. The alternative is not compassion, it is regression. If we fail to correct course, we may find ourselves in a society where almost no one has grown up at all.

Watch the Series: The Comprachicos Revisited

If these ideas resonate with you, or if you’re curious to dig deeper, check out the video series I produced on my YouTube channel called The Comprachicos Revisited. You can follow the read-along and join the conversation here. It’s not just a history lesson, it’s a mirror held up to today’s most urgent questions about childhood, education, and adulthood.