[DoctorOetker]

At a bare minimum, there is the amount of time and money spent on going through things, there are many things to learn.

Imagine you have children, or imagine your children still go to school.

Imagine someone propose to expose all the kids to even more gore and abhorrent imagery, movies, ... for some genuine goal, and lets just assume the goal is universally agreed to be genuinely desirable, for the sake of this discussion:

1) would you blindly approve it?

2) would you approve doubling the amount of time or financial resources a few years later? or would you condition it on something?

3) wouldn't you prefer whatever the goal and whatever the method, that goal metrics and method performance be compared?

4) a lot of people are raised to not never come close or touch this or that fence post, or talk about touching it, or even merely think about why people can't touch it; we can't run social experiments on the kids! we are doing this precisely to prevent the horrible "social experiment" of WWII with all the horrors that came with it.

If these thoughts feel "dirty" or "bad" or "naughty" you have been raised to think in an authoritarian fashion (we all have been to a greater or lesser extent).

Let's start with the "social experiment", the truth is educational systems are constantly running unintentional experiments: perhaps some parents tell their kids to skip this or that class, so governments enforce mandatory education, and minimum targets... well, even with 100% pupil compliance, there exist many reasons a student didn't attend: perhaps they were truly sick, or their school bus broke down, etc. Ooops some of the students didn't see the full curriculum! Different schools show different movies. Different student generations saw different movie distribution on the subject. All of these are unintentional experiments. Mass surveillance was happening, is happening, and will happen for the foreseeable future. Sometimes young adults join some extreme right wing party, or perhaps express such a sentiment online. We could try to correlate the natural variations (which movies did they see, which explanations did they receive, ...) with any flagged statements?

How do we prevent pupils from merely associating the "bad behavior" merely with the red,white and black color palette, the german accents, the fonts and vehicle models that were in use; instead of associating it with authoritarianism proper? Think of how Laibach (the original Rammstein) challenges and ridicules authoritarianism by permitting the audience to enjoy the non-authoritarianist elements: there is no fault in liking such color schemes, or finding beauty in such a font, the problem was people following orders and blindly complying when ordered to drop disinfectant developed for ships and warehouses, (Zyklon B) canisters down some shafts in full knowledge some poor souls will die because of it. Laibach eclectically mixes symbolism from diverse dictatorships in a riveting way, but while criticizing authoritarianism and ridiculing it. They faced a lot of pushback because they necessarily stay in character to get the message across, how easy it is to be carried away by aesthetics and the smallest excuse to stop thinking.

Contrast system A and B:

System A: educational system just drills in (with best intentions) how bad Nazi's were, without measuring effectiveness, and thus without measure what the minimum nudge necessary was to achieve the same goal, risking loose associations such "as long as me, my friends, my compatriots aren't wearing the exact same armbands, don't speak specifically the aggressive german accent, don't use that font throughout society, etc. then me, my friends, my compatriots couldn't be lapsing into authoritarianism", which destroys insights like "the banality of evil", which would necessitate a much stronger form of critical thinking, but which state leadership tends to not appreciate in its population despite claiming they seek it in their population...

System B: kids constantly ask "why?", education is much more effective if information is provided when the students wonder about something, compared to being force-fed factoids if they are not the party asking "why?" about something. Let's consider a hypothetical scenario, in a truly critical-thinker-generating authoritarianism averting education system:

History teacher starts talking about and showing pictures of horrible scenes in WWII.

Students are reminded of the previous class a week ago and don't want to see the imagery, they ask "why? why must we sit inside and watch and discuss this war porn?"

The teacher is happy to oblige: "There are many reasons, its complicated, but I will be upfront: the reason I present them is because I need to reach certain targets, some education milestones, set in Brussels / Berlin / Wherever. If I don't I will get in trouble, but not only that, I agree with those milestones and think you should see it."

The kids ask: "Why did they set those milestones for you?"

The teacher responds: "Well, although states tend to abuse this excuse, in order to increase national identity, there is a genuine purpose to teaching history: so we don't repeat the mistakes made in previous generations, so we can learn from their mistakes"

The kids ask: "But surely we can't go through all mistakes that have occurred in all of human history, can't we keep it shorter, the sun is shining outside"

The teacher responds: "OK here is a deal I will dedicate this single session to answer all your meta-questions, but in return you will give full attention in all my future classes".

The kids agree and repeat there question: "Why do we have to go through this horrorfest?"

The teacher responds: "To put it bluntly, to prevent us from lobbing chemicals at each other again, among other things, its more than chemicals, its fundamentally about authoritarianism, that's why we have to sit you through this multi-year, multi-movie, multi-museum, multi-book, multi-essay horrorfest".

The kids ask "But why does it have to be so repetitive? why does it have to be so inefficient? We could be learning more math, learn about cryptography, learn how to bolster civil rights, human rights, children's rights with cryptography, instead of this thing that feels like brainwashing, which you basically already admitted it to be, benevolent brain-washing but brain-washing none-the-less, why?"

Teacher: "because among all possible ways of hopefully immunizing the next generation from making the same mistakes, no effort was spared, with many overlapping and potentially redundant approaches simultaneously applied, just to make sure the message didn't fly over anyone's head, I guess, and over time people were too afraid to touch it or decrease it in any way."

Student: "We see 3 costs: you rob us of our time we could have spent freely outside, you rob us of precious time we could have spent on other subjects and worst of all you rob us of our humanistic innocence, you show us this war porn and we mentally place ourselves in the shoes of both victim and perpetrator, we will never be the same. If you or the system is willing to make such a drastic intervention in every child's life, you better carry proof that its provably the least invasive intervention which provably suffices, is that the case?"

Teacher: "How would you propose such a proof is generated and assembled?"

Kids: "The surveillance state has no qualms tracking every fart we make as long as the data is only used for improving sales of whatever the system happened to overproduce last month, or for whatever dark scheme some billionaire needs the data for, but actually using it for good things like finding the most time-,cost-,soul-sparing education on the subject to correlate our behavior with the exact variation of authoritarianism-related courseware each individual experienced, no the system and the economy can't be bothered... we must sit through inordinate amounts of soul-scarring horrorfest, all because of ... vibes? no systematic correlation measurement?"

Do you think system A (where kids must learn to accept the status quo of education, like it or not) or system B (where kids learn and criticize the status quo) is more likely to produce authoritarianism vs critical thinkers?