If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read... It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
The traditional education theory [is] to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.
Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries... The decision finally rests not upon appeals to past authority, but upon what people want. |
