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We don’t love material, we hate it. And we are devoted to the cause of converting it as fast as possible into junk and poison gas. We are not people who love time (which is one of the measurements of material) and space (which is another), we want to abolish it.
We want to get as fast as possible from one place to another; to get rid of space and to get rid of time. And the result of this is, of course, that—as we get rid of space and time, as we make all places almost immediately accessible by jet aircraft—all places become the same place. So naturally, the tourist who is beg...
But of course it isn’t. Honolulu is the same place as Coney Island, Atlantic City. Tokyo is just the same: it is simply an extension of Los Angeles; one of our suburbs.
Because the faster you can get from place to place, the more you have conquered the limitations of time and space, the more everywhere is the same place. So the differences between different cultures, the differences between people, the things that we want to see when we go to foreign places are increasingly unavailabl...
Food. And as I just indicated, we eat—as in the case of the TV dinner—food that is good for us. You know, it’s always said that the French eat with gusto, but the British eat apologetically, and we’ve inherited the British tradition.
We eat—in a way, it is rather animal to eat. It’s a little vulgar that you have to chew food and stick it down into your stomach, and it passes through your intestines, and so on. That’s rather degrading.
It means your are, after all, an animal, not simply an angel. And therefore, there should be good reason for doing this vulgar act. And the good reason is that it’s healthy, and, therefore, when you eat food—really, ideally—it should all be concentrated into a pill so that you wouldn’t have to waste valuable time over ...
And so, therefore, when you study, in general, the art of cooking in the United States—from coast to coast—it is pretty poor. It is not something that is done out of love, that it’s something that is done out of duty. And so we are great adepts in what I will call eating the menu instead of the dinner, because the dinn...
All sorts of people who have a certain amount of professional training cook not because they like cooking, but because it’s a job through which you can make money. Money, which is perfectly abstract and inedible. This is a fallacy, you see, this division between work and play: that anybody who regards being a cook in a...
He has been persuaded to spend a very substantial part of his life doing something which he hates doing in order that he may earn the wherewithal to do what is really fun later on. And this—insofar as our education is oriented towards training people for jobs—this is the colossal fallacy in it. The only jobs worth work...
And it is possible to enjoy thoroughly being, say, a cook in a restaurant if you are allowed to take delight in it, and to reverence the fish, the flour, the vegetables, the fruit which are provided for you to work with. But as things stand, what happens is exactly the reverse. You go into a restaurant where they give ...
And it says something like this: “Filet of Colorado Mountain Trout, fried to a delicate golden brown in breadcrumbs, garnished with fresh garden peas, French fried potatoes, and lemon wedge.” The last time I encountered this it was in a restaurant where they had the nerve to keep an open kitchen, and when I saw the so-...
Now, the thing that has to be understood fundamentally in the whole process of education for life is that money is an abstraction. It cannot, of itself, buy any pleasure whatsoever because all pleasures involve skill and love. Enough love to discipline yourself to enjoy the pleasure.
I live in—as was told during the introduction—in Sausalito, which is a lovely waterfront town north of San Francisco, and we have harbors galore filled with pleasure craft—sailing boats, motor cruisers—which, for the most part, nobody ever uses except for cocktail parties aboard when they’re tied up. Very few people go...
Well, you didn’t have time to do that because you were so busy making money. So all these boats just stand around, but nobody really enjoys them at all because they won’t take the trouble; having been persuaded that money is wealth. Take another case of this delusion: you could make a lot of money, say, in the grocery ...
You cheat on the weight and you cheat on the quality. You make more and more money; fine! But when you got it, what are you going to buy with it?
Other people’s shoddy products! We have cars with built-in obsolescence which are nothing but toy rocket ships. We have—as I said—various kinds of foodstuffs which are increasingly lacking in nutritive elements.
We have houses which are made of ticky-tacky. We have entertainment in which there is no participation; you’re not allowed to join, you just watch. We are busily fouling our own nest.
Have you smelt the air today in this town? It all smells of some kind of funny acid. And this is supposed to be people who are rich, and wealthy, and know how to enjoy themselves.
It’s a farce! And, to some extent, the reason for this farce is the whole philosophy of education through which our children are being processed. I want to look at this, but I want to look at it—first of all—from the standpoint of bringing up children in this culture and the whole structure and nature of the family.
Because that’s where the puzzle begins. Have you noticed that, over many years, a large number of the jokes in most of our popular magazines where they print cartoons have to do with father as a clown? Take Dagwood, in the comic strip.
The incompetence of dad, who is always some kind of an idiot, whereas mom has to handle the real problems of the family, and is therefore the realist in the picture. Dad is a clown. Why?
Because he goes away to a mysterious place called the office or the factory, in which the family as such have no part and no real interest. He brings back a thing called money, and they want more of it, see, back at home. They don’t care how you get it just so long as you bring it back, because they’re not interested i...
And when you come back from the various rat-races in which you are engaged making money, you’re supposed to be a good pal to the children and play with them, and look after your wife and appreciate what she’s done all during the day. They have no interest in what you do; they couldn’t care less. And furthermore, you as...
Americans have an enormous sense of guilt because they have not done right by their children, and they’re trying more and more to do right by their children. And they always feel they haven’t quite succeeded somehow. We are child-centered families.
Guilty—constantly feeling guilty—because we haven’t brought them up, and therefore we call in every kind of specialist and expert and advisor to tell us what we should do with our children. The difficulty is that the family, as an institution, is not surviving in industrial culture. It is an institution designed for an...
The family was built around the farm, where the children worked on the farm and understood and were brought up into the interest of the farm, the small shop—or the workshop—such as you find in an agrarian culture. It’s fascinating to notice today the transition from agrarian to industrial culture in a country like Japa...
The Japanese have been some of the best carpenters in the world—absolutely marvelous: knowing how to make the most complex joinery constructions without even using a blueprint, doing it by feel and by eye. In order to train a person to do this kind of carpentry, he has to begin to learn when he’s seven years old. But a...
The child gets through school, goes through high school. When the child gets out it’s not interested in carpentry, it’s interested in girls—has to fool around with that for a while and then get married, and then begin to learn the carpenter’s trade, and it’s too late to be anything but somebody who follows a blueprint....
For what? I know many carpenters in the United States today who take enormous pride in their work, who love to produce a beautifully finished object made of wood, but they cannot find jobs because no employer can afford that time for this workman to finish a product. It has to be turned out looking good on the surface,...
So it’ll wear out and they have to do another one. So nobody has any satisfaction in the job. And the reason is that the family no longer holds together, because the man in the family has to go away and earn a living that has absolutely no relation to his living relationship with his wife and his children.
And therefore, naturally, he’s regarded as a clown. When he comes home he’s not really a very good pal to his children because the children would find a real relationship with their father in joining in his work with him. Every little child wants to join in his parent’s work.
They go into the kitchen—they would much rather play with the pots and pans than anything else. They want to help; they naturally want to join in, but they cannot. And therefore, instead of being allowed to join in with the real work with their parents, they are given propitiatory objects called toys.
You may have a toy stove. You may have toy dolls and pretend that they are babies. You may not actually look after the baby, because there might be an accident.
So the children are propitiated with every kind of fake plastic thing that adults are supposed to use, especially those real adults who go out and fight the wars, you know? Then they have a plastic gun. And the children are not satisfied with this.
They are absolutely frustrated with it because all these toys fall apart in a hurry, they don’t really work, they don’t do what’s expected of them, they are not real. And the child knows they are not real and is—you should see Christmas Day: when you really think about Christmas Day in the average family and realize th...
“You are children, doo-dee, doo-dee, doo-dee, doo!” You see? “You don’t really count.” And so, as the whole educational process continues, they are educated for un-reality—for non-entity—by being progressively fooled. You see, it works like this: You know this story of the donkey who has a carrot suspended in front of ...
So he’ll always chase it but never catch it. So this is what we do: we send a child into kindergarten and make him literate, more or less. “Run, Spot, run!” And all that.
And then the inducement is: if you learn this, you’ll get into first grade. And wowee! If you do well there, you’ll get into second grade.
And so there’s kind of a come-on, see? You’ll go through the step-by-step educational process. There’s going to be a big event when you get out of grade school: you go to high school.
And the pace is coming on now, see? And you’re going to get, step by step, up through high school because of something at the end of the line. You haven’t got it yet.
There’s a thing coming! Go to college. Whew!
Made it that far. And step by step you go on. Then you get to graduate school.
If you are smart at this point, you stay there. But if you don’t get into graduate school so that you can just stay in the academic scheme of things, you go into business. That’s “getting out into the world.” That’s graduation.
See, now you’re really—you’re an adult. Well, then the first thing is: you get into a sales meeting where they say: “Make that quota!” And if you do, they’re going to give you a higher quota. And that thing is at the end of the line.
It’s there, and all the advertisements say by the time you earn this and get that, you’ll be able to have the right kind of car, the right kind of speed boat, the right kind of tract lot, the right kind of clothes, and everything. The right kind of drinks. And you’ll be there!
And finally, you work along at this. You’re earnest. And about the year 45 you end up as vice president of the company—maybe president—and you say, “Whew, I’ve arrived.
I’m there! But I feel vaguely cheated, because I feel just the same as I always felt. I’m there, but I haven’t caught up with that thing I was always promised.” And suddenly, an insurance man comes around and says, “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk, wait a minute!
You’re going to retire at 65. We’ve got a program for you so that you’ll be just right. When you’re 65, you’ll be able to drop all this business and do what you really want to do.” By that time you’re not interested.
Prostate trouble, bad teeth, all of you is just falling apart—because you ate all of the stuff (that you were making) to make money with. Money goes nowhere; it’s absolutely useless. So, you know, you end up feeling you’ve been cheated.
And the reason was simply this: that education was regarded as a process of preparation for something which never happened; never is going to happen. But you were always getting prepared for life. A real education is an entirely different thing.
Education, in the real sense, is not preparation for life, it is actually living. It is participating. It is the child participating in adult concerns, and doing it now, and realizing that the point of the process in which the child is engaged is not to prepare the child for the future, but to enjoy doing the thing tod...
Because the whole point is that there is no point whatsoever in making plans for the future except for those people who are capable of living in the present. If you are not capable of living in the present, plans are useless, because when those plans come to fruition you will be incapable of enjoying that fruition. Don...
If you are not capable of living in the present, don’t make any plans. If you are capable of living in the present, then some plans may be useful because they will produce something which you can enjoy and take part in. But it seems to me that the absolute point of any educational system that has any worth whatsoever i...
Instead of saying to children, “No, you go away and play while we do what’s important,” let them in on what we consider important at once. This is very difficult in we call the child-centered family. If, you see, you regard what you do in life as not the (say, your profession, your vocation, your job) if you regard tha...
And you justify this on the grounds that it will give you money to bring up your children to do something better than you are doing, you are fooling yourself. Because your child will copy you, and if you exist simply to bring up your children for something better than you have, then your children will do nothing but ex...
If, on the other hand, you are doing something in life—you have a vocation, a work which you are doing—which you are really interested in and which you thoroughly enjoy, and it’s this that you live for and not your children, then your children will catch your enthusiasm and they, in turn, will find something that they ...
You should live for your own good, and then your children will learn—from your example—how to live. So education, then, is a progressive letting of children into adult life, not a preparation for adult life. The whole idea of preparation should be discarded; there is simply increased participation in what we are doing.
I have just come from Mexico, from a very primitive area, where the educational system is sloppy—thank goodness—and I watched builders at work, and they are wonderfully skillful with brick. Here are the older men working on a house, surrounded with little boys who are their children. And the little boys are running err...
And they feel one with their fathers. Dad isn’t some obscure being, off there, who they occasionally meet in the evening, and who does something completely mysterious, and is supposed to chum up with them on a purely play basis. See, what is d— what it is in our families: dad comes home and he plays with the children a...
He reads them a story about the mousey and the teddy bear. And, having done that, he’s satisfied his duty, he’s done his penance for having had them. But these so-called primitive Mexicans have their children working along with them, and those Mexican children—I’m not, of course, speaking of Mexico City and the great i...
They’re little men, the boys, with a curious competence and a curious wisdom. Little men who can be trusted to do all kinds of things. But they are really related to their parents because they are engaged in the same work as their parents.
But, you see, we have abandoned all responsibility for our children by sending them away to be educated by other people and other children; especially by other children. All equally—I mean, it’s the blind leading the blind! And so we’re increasingly oppressed by guilt that we somehow haven’t done right by our children,...
But the whole trouble is we’re—may I say—ass-backwards: we are living for the children with nothing to give them because we do not have a real enthusiasm for our own vocation, or profession, or whatever it is in life. If you make it central—the idea of the Hindus, of your svadharma (or, in the Christian terms, vocation...
Imagine going to the bank and bringing your children along with you to peek over the counter while you hand out the cash, put in the checks. We, you see—in any important thing we do—we get rid of our children. We get the babysitter.
And when we’re going to have fun in the evening: get the babysitter and keep the children out of it for heaven’s sakes! And this is simply symbolic of the fact that children are utterly excluded from real life, and they’re put in these completely artificial schools where they learn to be cerebral and merely literate. T...
Now, what are the fundamental arts that we need in this life? If we are to be comfortable, if we are to enjoy ourselves, we need good food; well cooked. Isn’t that fundamental?
Do you live to eat or do you eat to live? Both, of course. But if you don’t live to eat, the food that you eat won’t be very nutritive to enable you to eat to live.
You won’t take any trouble over it, you won’t love it. Look: when you get materials—you’ve got some onions, you’ve got some fish, you’ve got a slice of beef—you can’t cook that properly unless you love it. All those are dead creatures which have died in your honor; what’re you going to do about that?
The only way to deal respectfully with a creature that has died in your honor is to give it an honorable cooking. The dead cow you are eating is becoming you, and the least you can do for it is to let it enjoy itself as you. And therefore, the stove in the kitchen is an altar, and you are a priest at that altar, and yo...
Look at a beautiful mackerel that has been caught and prepared for you; handed out by the supermarket: you’ve got this thing; it’s a living being that’s died to give you life. The best thing you can do for it is to prepare it royally, and you should brood over your stove with an act of love and see that it’s exactly ri...
They overcook it so that it’s dry and tasteless, because they don’t watch it, they don’t wait until the exact moment when it’s right. Because cooking is regarded as a chore, something that poor wives have to do. Look at the kitchen!
Most kitchens are like bathrooms! You know, you go into the bathroom to clean up, to excrete and so on—which is sort of nasty, so you put it out of the way. The kitchens also, in most homes, are whitewashed places with white refrigerators, and white white washing machines, and white sinks that look like surgeries or ba...
I have always found a formula: wherever you find a colorless kitchen, you will find tasteless food. Now, in any real life, any real home, the kitchen is the center of the house. There’s a great hearth where things are bubbling, and everybody gathers around that, waiting with eager appetites while they watch this thing ...
Everybody’s just waiting there, sitting around the fire, to begin. And instead of having—you see, most houses are nowadays designed so that you pretend you still have servants. So there’s the parlor—or the living space, which is prepared off from the kitchen—where you are ladies and gentlemen, see?
And then you have a room downstairs where the children play, in the basement: the rumpus room. And you have this thing that you’re ladies and gentlemen in the living room, and there’s a kitchen off there where, actually, the lady of the house shoots out all by herself—harassed—has to get all this stuff ready to present...
There’s nothing of the kind. Poor wife is alone, rushing—say, when you’re entertaining people in the evening—she’s fixing all this stuff. Whereas, if we were realistic, the kitchen would be the main room of the house, and everybody would gather around and watch it all being done, because nothing increases your appetite...
And we would treat this as a sacrament; a beautiful thing being done to get the food ready for us. But this simply doesn’t happen, except in very few far out bohemian homes where they’ve returned to this kind of thing. So cooking, then, is one of the arts of material competence, and we do not teach it!
You take a course in home ec, dietetics, and so on, in the average school, high school, or college, it doesn’t teach you how to cook. The class of dietician and the class of cook are mutually exclusive because the dietician is taught to measure everything with a test tube, whereas a cook is taught to measure everything...
What’s another important thing in life of material competence? Well, obviously, the house itself: the home, the building, the place you live in. A materialist—a person who thinks that the material, physical world is important (as we are supposed to think)—would therefore take a great deal of trouble to see that he has ...
Take a look around Los Angeles. We’re living in clapboard, thrown-together places that are an insult. We have ruined the Hollywood Hills here by leveling them off into terraces, so that you could the kind of houses that are designed to be built on a flat area.
And they’re put on the hills, and then the watercourses are all changed, and when it rains heavily, alright, Kim Novak’s house is inundated with mud—which serves her right. I’m sorry, I like her very much, but she shouldn’t’ve bought a house like that. Because they’re not adapted to the hills.
If you like to live in the hills, you want to live in hills. Therefore, don’t turn them into flat areas. Therefore, design a house which is appropriate to a hill.
A house which will not disturb the hill, which will fit in with the contours of nature and the vegetation of nature as it already exists. Which is what you wanted to live in and enjoy anyhow, wasn’t it? Take another important aspect of material life: furniture.
Whew! Have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood’s home? You know, it’s… really, one of the things that we suffer from is we have too much furniture.
We have these enormous couches, and armchairs that look like they were gun emplacements, and overstuffed monsters of things, and all kinds of fake antiques, and fake modern stuff, too. Because it’s simply things that have been thrown together by people who didn’t like doing it. Much better to have a very few pieces of ...
And we have many amazing pretentious beds with all sorts of headboards and ornamentations, and they’re impossible to move around. When it comes to moving house, they’re a great weight and an inconvenience, and they’re—unlike practical materialists, such as the Japanese—we never learned how to sleep comfortably on the f...
Well, we’ve considered—well, let’s think of clothes. That’s important. Here we come across something fantastic.
We just don’t know how to dress. All men in the United States—with some exceptions on the West Coast—look like funeral directors. Look here: I’m wearing this thing as a concession for propriety.
I don’t know what’s the matter, but it absolutely is a violation of the nature of cloth. Cloth naturally is a two-way system with warp and woof, and it’s woven in rectangles. That’s the convenient way to weave cloth.
And therefore, cloth is straight stuff which will hang upon the human body with great dignity and fall naturally into folds if made in, say, the form of a Japanese kimono. But this thing is a bastard uniform, with buttons on the sleeve which serve no other purpose than a relic of the days when they were there to preven...
Because it is a fake which is designed to fit the human body, to fit the contours of the male figure, which is not in the nature of cloth. Cloth should hang on you, and then it is dignified. But when it is shaped in this way it doesn’t fit you.
You have violated the nature of cloth, and therefore you’ve got yourself a kind of a silly garment. And, furthermore, it is not comfortable. Let’s take, for example, trousers: trousers are designed for women, not men.
Not all women look good in trousers, but, certainly, they are very uncomfortable for men. Men should wear freely flowing skirts, because that suits their anatomy. But we consider that sissy for purely abstract reasons.
We wear all kinds of complicated neckties, and buttons, and everything to make us uncomfortable. And furthermore, our clothes are mostly badly sewn, rottenly put together, and very quickly fall apart. So that if you want really good clothes today, you must buy them from peasants.
You can go, for example, to Mexico and get gorgeous woolen clothes: serapes, sweaters, that are absolutely beautiful. You can still go to the Orient and buy magnificent clothes made by people who enjoy making them, whereas here we dress in a colorless, drab way. And we wear this symbolic necktie, which is really a nuis...
We, in other words, don’t enjoy clothing. We ought to enjoy clothing. What’s the point of going around in clothes unless you enjoy clothes?
What else is a matter of fundamental material competence that everybody ought to know about? Well, let’s take lovemaking. That’s very fundamental.
This is something that our children learn through whispered hearsay, or through a few courses in hygiene in high school, which tell the bare facts but nothing of the art. And this is picked up in a sloppy, slovenly way because of this weird—I mean, here is the real payoff in this culture where we say we are materialist...
It’s associated with the toilet. And therefore, it is something basically prohibited. But men brought up in the WASP culture know that it’s really supposed to be fun, and so they sort of snicker about it.

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