Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Unmanageable

Shortly after adolescence was professionalized, a decline in the numbers of patent applications by Americans occurred. After WWII, when institutionalized schooling including college and kindergarten grew by leaps and bounds, that decline accelerated. Universal schooling had weakened the imagination, just as Spinoza predicted it would in 1690, and Fichte predicted in the second decade of the 19th century. Of course, both those men were heartily in favor of that weakening; their school schemes were for the benefit of the "best" people. But if those relative ancients could work out the school mechanism and its negative effects long before it existed, surely you can, too.

Why would anybody want to do this? That's easy: imaginative individuals are notoriously unmanageable and unpredictable, because they are irrepressibly inventive.

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 46, 47

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