(April 30, 2019 at 7:11 am)Belaqua Wrote: Walter Pater, an elite aesthete who influenced any number of non-elite people, wrote (paraphrasing): "education increases a person's capacity for pleasure." Today it seems that people believe the opposite. Education is only for money and pleasure has to be enjoyed with the mind switched off as much as possible.
When I was in high school, I remember thinking that I didn't like my school because it was teaching the kids to dislike learning. It's a failure of the education system when teachers can't make education relevant to their students. A friend of mine and I carried on our own reading program on the side. Chris was the only national merit scholar in our class, and he dropped out of high school in disgust. He was much happier in college.
Of course, in the 1850s Thoreau complained about people not being interested in continual education, which he saw as one of the great joys and challenges of life. He got by as a pencil-maker and surveyor while he was reading Greek classics in the original Greek.
