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Notes -
In boarding schools, it's still the parents who choose the school and strongly influence what the child is taught and how it is raised. Before boarding school, the child was raised by the family or at least in very close proximity to the family. After boarding school, the child remains a member of the family. It's a looser form of familial organization, but it's still there. And even orphans ultimately grow up in a society founded and shaped by and still composed of and structured for the benefit of families. Having vat-grown humans as a large part or even the majority of a population will be fundamentally disruptive in unpredictable ways. I wouldn't discount @Crake's concerns so easily, even as I agree with your point that printing humans may be better than demographic collapse. Especially his point about the sheer degree of power invested the institutions that print and raise and educate those new and infinitely available humans. Take any concerns people might have about the faults of educational systems, propaganda or state control over society, and multiply by an arbitrarily large factor, and that's probably still not enough worry given the immensity of the monster that would be created there.
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