Learning and Unlearning

By William Deresiewicz. “What is not reasonable is that we have constructed an educational system that produces highly intelligent, accomplished twenty-two-year-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives: no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one. Who can follow an existing path but don’t have the imagination— or the courage, or the inner freedom— to invent their own.”

By Herbert Kohl. Drawing on an idea of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Kohl argues for “creative maladjustment” in the classroom and anywhere else that students’ intelligence, dignity, or integrity are compromised by a teacher, an institution, or a larger social mindset.