Selected excerpts from The Independent Scholar's Handbook :
Exploration of the full range of one's own potentialities is not something that the self-renewing person leaves to the chances of life. It is something we must pursue systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of our days. We must look forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life -- not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent.
The society could do much to encourage our self-development. But up to now the conception of individual fulfillment and lifelong learning finds no adequate reflection in our social [or economic or political, I might add MH] institutions. For too long we have paid pious lip service to the idea and trifled with it in practice." John Gardner as quoted in The Independent Scholar's Handbook, p. 140.
Education is supposed to prepare people to fit into the system and support the system, and really it's to turn people into nuts and bolts to keep the system together. How can you get truly independent thinking, independent research and inquiry, in a system like that. Myles Horton as quoted in TISH, p.141.
A society based on brainpower, on good new ideas, no longer can rely on one sector (academe) or on a specialized subunit (the research and development divisions of companies) to produce this new knowledge. It can and must harness the intellectual capacities of a far wider section of its highly educated, mentally adventurous work force. What could be more exemplary of the great American tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Buckminster Fuller? [p.188]
