
“Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?”
Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 14, “Land of My Own” (p. 142)
Huey Long on African American Education (Williams p. 524)
“Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?”
Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 14, “Land of My Own” (p. 142)
“Each for himself is still the rule
We learn it when we go to school—
The devil take the hindmost, O!”
In the Great Metropolis http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/greatmetropolis.html, st. 1.
Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 18
Context: From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child. Please follow this carefully. Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems — the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. From childhood we have done this. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems. From childhood we are trained, educated to live with problems and, therefore, being centred in problems, we can never solve any problem completely. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.
“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”
“Please forget everything that you have learned in school; for you haven't learned it.”
Foundations of Analysis (1960) as quoted by Eli Maor, The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-year History (2007)