Q: If we consider the likelihood that we as humans have an instinct for creativity and a moral instinct, what is it in the way our system of education is functioning, that perverts or inhibits these instincts from fully developing themselves?
A: A good educational system ought to nurture and encourage these aspects of human life and allow them to flourish. But of course that has problems. For one thing it means that you will encourage challenge of authority and domination. It will encourage questioning of powerful institutions. The fact of the matter is that honesty, integrity, creativity, all these things we're supposed to value, all run up dramatically against the hierarchic, authoritarian structure of the institutional framework in which we live. And since that structure is what sets the basic framework in which things happen, it becomes virtually contradictory to implement the values that you talk about in church on Sunday morning. So you put the values to the side, to the Sunday Service, and get on with existing the rest of the time. So Sunday is when you say, yeah, love and kindness and charity and equality and all that stuff are the soul of life. But the other six days of the week you're working within institutions of authority and domination and control and self-enrichment and so on and you must comply or suffer even graver consequences for not complying.
And schools are like that. So the way schools actually function - of course it's not 100 percent, because there is a contradiction, so all sorts of aspects show themselves depending on the teacher and so on - but, by and large, there's a very strong tendency which works its way out in the long run and on average, for the schools to have a kind of filtering effect. They filter out independence of thought, creativity, imagination, and in their place foster obedience and subordination. I think everyone knows this from their own history. Like, how did I get to a good college myself? I was always very critical and dissident. But I got there by shutting up! I went through high school, thinking it was all really stupid and authoritarian and boring, but I was obedient, I was quiet, I wasn't a behavior problem, I didn't tell the teacher what I thought he was teaching was ludicrous when I thought it was. And I made it to a good college.
There are people who don't accept, who aren't obedient. They are weeded out, they're driving taxi cabs, they're behavior problems. The long-term effect of this is to reward and foster subordination; it begins in kindergarten and goes all the way through your professional or other career. If you challenge authority, you get in one or another kind of trouble. Again, it's not 100 percent the case, and there are some areas of life were it's dramatically not the case, but on average and overwhelmingly in the outcomes, it holds...
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Liza Featherstone wrote:
> ...But many -- I'd venture to say most -- of the "smartest" people I
> met at Michigan [by smart here I mean creative, capable of saying
> something surprising or otherwise interesting, engaged with ideas
> outside the classroom, in short people you want to stay up late
> getting high with] weren't in this program. In fact, the program, vs.
> the many different kind of intelligence in the larger student
> population, was kind of a test tube display of how SAT/ACT scores do
> measure some things, but not others.
>