Parenting & Family Quote by Maynard James Keenan

Keenan’s line lands like a warning disguised as a shrug: if you’re outsourcing childhood education to mass media, you’re not just getting trivia and headlines, you’re accepting someone else’s operating system. Coming from a musician who’s spent a career poking at conformity and commodified emotion, the intent isn’t to romanticize schools as pure. It’s to point out how power works when it’s invisible: you don’t need censorship if you can saturate attention.

The subtext is about ownership, not content. Radio, TV, and newspapers aren’t neutral pipelines; they’re businesses with incentives, gatekeepers, advertisers, and political relationships. Keenan collapses “education” into “exposure,” because in real life, what kids absorb isn’t a curriculum - it’s repetition. The stuff that repeats becomes “common sense.” That’s the quiet mechanism of control he’s gesturing at: the ability to decide what counts as important, what’s laughable, what’s scary, who’s credible, and which problems are “just the way things are.”

Context matters: this is a post-90s media critique from an era when consolidation was accelerating and “24/7 information” was starting to feel like 24/7 programming. Read now, it almost underestimates the situation. We’ve moved from a few outlets owned by “the powers that be” to algorithmic feeds where ownership and influence are both more concentrated and more disguised. Keenan’s edge is that he frames it as a custody battle over attention: whoever holds the channels, writes the lesson plan.