Sir: I am appalled. I am also outraged. It would not be too much to say that I am incandescently furious.

What is the object, you ask, of my white-hot indignation? I have forgotten. It has been years since I was able to specify the cause of my appalledment. All I know is that I have been appalled for a good long time now, and in those years I have built up heaps of appalledness, a fortress of appalleditude, an appallation mountain as it were. I am appalled when I rise in the morning. I am appalled while I eat breakfast. I am appalled at work all day; I am appalled when I come home to my efficiency apartment; I am appalled when I lay my head on my pillow.

It is, in short, my state of unrelenting appalledification that gets me through the day. But I was not always so fortunate. I had to teach myself the skills I have so laboriously built up: no one taught me to be appalled this way. In school, outrage was not even a whole class, let alone the main focus of my education. Only in history classes was any kind of outrage specifically taught, and even then only in conjunction with very limited subjects, like slavery. Anyone can be appalled by slavery! Where’s the skill in that? It would not be too much to say that it took a lifetime of careful training and desensitization for the slaveholding classes not to be appalled by slavery.

What we need is a complete reform of our educational system. Throw out all the useless detritus of the past, which only a misguided reverence for tradition keeps alive. Children don’t need to learn math, because we have calculators on our phones. Children don’t need to learn to write, because we have artificial intelligence. Children don’t need to learn to read, because we have YouTube. What children do need is the skill to be appalled all the time, without the need of a particular subject to be appalled about. They need to learn the art of nonspecific outrage. Perhaps, if I may offer a suggestion, they can be taught to be appalled about their own education, and then it will be easy for them to generalize from there.

—Sincerely,
“Mad Marvin” Blitzmueller, M.Ed.