"One problem, put simply, is that in every school I have visited, public or private, traditional or?

Question

"innovational," the students have only these two choices: to drop out (either physically or mentally) or to make themselves smaller and smaller until they can act in ways their elders expect...The students are asked to put aside the best things about themselves--their own desires, impulses, and ideas--in order to "adjust" to an environment constructed for children who existed one hundred years ago, if at all...Even the best teachers, with the best intentions, seem to diminish their students as they work through the public-school system. for that system is, at bottom, designed to produce what we sometimes call good citizens but what more often than not turn out to be good soldiers; it is through the schools of the state, after all, that we produce our armies...In one way or another our methods produce in the young a condition of pain that seems very close to a mass neurosis; a lack of faith in oneself, a vacuum of spirit into which authority or institutions can move, a dependency they

feed on. Students are encouraged to relinquish their own wills, their freedom of volition; they are taught that value and culture reside outside oneself and must be acquired from teh institution, and almost everything in their education is designed to discourage them from activity, from the wedding of idea and act. It is almost as if we hoped to discourage them from thought itself by making ideas so lifeless, so hopeless, that their despair would be enough to make them manipulable and obedient."

---Source: "The open truth and fiery vehemence of youth: a sort of soliloquy," by Peter Marin, published in "The Center Magazine", January 1969.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

This isn't really a question.

Truth be told, many people don't want to think, they would rather have the institution do the thinking for them, whether they admit it or not.

There will always be people who think outside the box...they are the ones who command the countless others who don't.

Answer 2

It's amazing. All these people--professors who spend their lives doing researcch--because they are humble enough to know how much they don't know. All the engineers who spent years learning how to build the computers--the doctors who needed to spend years learning abbout the human body. . .

And you are so much sparter than they are. It must be wonderful.