Digging into the past

So I've started getting ready for the big move, and as usual this involves a lot of archaeology, trying to determine what of the detritus from the past should be kept and what should be thrown away or donated. "Rosetta stone paperweight", goodbye!

Probably the most fun is when I stumble across some bit I wrote for high school or earlier. I don't know if this is true of most people, but my personality and beliefs were pretty much set by the time I'd reached high school, and available video, photographic, and written relics of my high school years tend to back that statement up. I like to think that this is because I was exposed to such a wide range of thinkers by that time, and not a sign that I became a curmudgeon at age 16.

In any case, by high school, I had already realized how important the access to knowledge was to what I believed and thought. It is always daunting to realize that if I was raised in a different environment, or didn't have access to public libraries in a country that values free speech so highly, that my very psychology would be different. Submitted as evidence that I have always believed this: an English assignment from high school where various phrases were to be examined. For each phrase, I was supposed to write whether or not I agreed or disagreed, standard stuff. The teacher wrote after my essay: "Neat idea--Everyone else who wrote on this, disagrees with you."

The phrase was: "There are no walls, there are no bolts, no locks that anyone can put on your mind."

My response was as follows: "I strongly disagree with that statement. We build ideas on 20,000 years of the past knowledge of the human race. If you are deprived of this knowledge, you have to "start over" with learning. No one can possibly do this. So that is the most effective lock that you can put on someone's mind."

What do you think?