I recently judged a short story competition run by a charity, and what dismayed me about the entries was they were all superficially bright and competent, correctly spelled and punctuated, and all absolutely lifeless.. They all bore the marks of having been drilled into the children: this is how you open a story; here you need some dialogue; you must have a punchy final paragraph. They would all have scored highly on a test. They were all empty, conventional and worthless.

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much.

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.