Looming behind all of the silly things that we do in schools, and pass off as an “education” that would have startled Socrates, there is nothing less than a great, pervading spirit of dullness and tedium, of irksome but necessary labors directed completely toward the consolidation of the mundane through the accumulation of the trivial. In schoool, there is no solemnity, no reverence, no awe, no wonder. We not only fail to claim but refuse to claim, and would be ashamed to claim that our proper business was with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and that this businss can be conducted not through arousing pleasant feelings, but through working the mind. Thus it is that education is exceedingly rare in schooling, and when it breaks out, it is as the result of some happy accident, an accident that might have befallen a prepared mind, or maybe any mind at all, just as readily in the streets as in the schools.
Education makes music out of the noise that fills our life.
Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire, P. 26
