Our society is a set of corporations, and it does not think, (yet) it works

American society is conformist because it is centered around the modern corporation and its culture. In childhood, the socialization into this world is through schools and their central entity, the classroom. This socialization is their principle purpose, although elsewhere it is given the content of an education which is informationally far from empty. In the America of my childhood, it was essentially empty. School was not a place of learning. Like television, it did provide activities that occupied the attention. The form of learning and socialization in American society seems to me backward, based on a principle that only makes sense in infancy, prior to the child's acquisition of language: instead of basing social life on what is learned through reading, the use of language to study artifacts and texts that enable us to build our social and moral life from our thinking rather than basing it upon the former. American culture does that. It is thus almost uniquely a common sense culture in which the given as taken-for-granted and unquestionable determines the understanding, rather than one in which how we are is essentially and normally subject to question. If that were the case, curiosity would be the norm rather than exception, facilitating both the inquiry of science and the common use of reason specific to democracy. Instead of that, most people seem quite certain of what they know to be true. For example, meanings are normally fixed in custom: these names indicate those things, and that is just how it is. Who could argue with that?