So Much Learnin'

Mucho Quotables:

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men."
-Bill Beattie

Whoa, man. If we didn't tell you what to think, all you'd ever think about are video games. Everyone knows kids have no ideas or aspirations of their own.

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
-Flannery O'Conner

Flan!! If only you had more learnin's you'd see through your sarcasm with your educated eyes that writers do need to be stifled. The artists of the world are the ones who shake it up! Free-thinking, individualistic people are the death of mediocrity. The faithful Pillars of mundanity, mediocrity, and monotony are our only defense against natural curiosity. A belief in the Pillars is a belief in everything you are told.

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
-Henry B. Adams

Facts are all that matters, because without inert facts--everyday, filling up their lives--students would start to use their brains and begin thinking for themselves. The Pillars must be preserved at all costs.

"Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you don't consider your students to be human beings."
-Lou Ann Walker

We don't, so that makes any theory and goal legitimate. They're littler than us, so we have the right to step on them.

"Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion."
-Mark Twain

You think they should know? Then they would have to learn about two things: discovery and rebellion. These are bad things because kids shouldn't have the freedom to discover anything for themselves. They exist only to be workers someday, so the closest they'll ever come to discovery is having us force disconnected facts down their throat. They also shouldn't question authority, because we are bigger than them and always right. We attribute rebellion to the silly mood swings of teenagers. The sooner you induce apathy and dispassion, the better.


***Credit for this image is due to an awesome artist called Luke Chueh. (I particularly like the ones with rainbows coming out of the necks of animals with their heads cut off.)***