Use of intelligence is an acquired skill
Education according to Ayn Rand
"The purposeful, disciplined use of his intelligence is the highest achievement possible to man: it is that which makes him human."
Ayn Rand was a writer and philosopher best known for her philosophical system called Objectivism. A glimpse into her views on education where expressed in her essay titled "The Comprachinos," published in 1970.
Rand begins her essay with an excerpt from Victor Hugo describing the comprachicos. The comprachinos, according to Hugo, were a "strange and hideous nomadic association famous in the seventeenth century" who bought and sold children. They disfigured the children they traded and used them for comedic purposes. As Hugo puts it, they created monsters.
Rand compares this practice to what is done to children in progressive nursery (pre) schools. But rather than deforming a child's physical body, educators, according to Rand, deform their minds.
"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. ... [T]oday’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."