Who Killed the Horse?: Part 3

(Excerpt  from Stop Beating the Dead Horse)


Unfortunately, truly successful people are getting fewer and fewer in the United States. The traits of the successful adult (independence, creativity, high energy, inquisitiveness, motivation, joy) are discouraged and suppressed in the current system because they create unruliness and disorder in the system. John Dewey, a progressive educational reformer of the late 1800s and early 1900s declared that

“children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.” 

By suppressing these traits, we are, by default, preventing truly successful adulthood. It is but a few rare individuals, usually those with strong familial support, who are able to overcome this repression of spirit and find real success in adulthood.

Take, for example, Albert Einstein: Einstein was enrolled in the Prussian compulsory institutions of learning but studied mathematics and reasoning on his own. In secondary school, Einstein was in constant conflict with school authorities and resented the confinement of school regimen. About school, he later wrote,

“One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.” 

Like Einstein, many of the intellectuals who were publicly schooled were less than satisfied about their educational experiences. Mark Twain, who seemed particularly discontented with his experiences in public school, said,

      “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

George Bernard Shaw wrote,

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”

I believe that most students in our country can succeed in a meaningful way in adulthood, given a system of education that encourages the traits of a successful adult. In the current system, however, this could never become a reality. This system encourages dependency, immaturity, irresponsibility, and mediocrity.