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the individual has willed (though he did not know it) whatever the Government tells him to do.
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What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social, or intellectual.
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individual differences must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, children... [who are not learning] languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies... Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have... "parity of esteem." ... Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma... by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
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Incentives to learn and penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented: who are they to overtop their fellows?*
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Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated.