“The next of your great troubles is education. Those who want young men to go to college are like a lot of bandits preying on the land. Your American college is a school of struggle. Examinations are struggle, athletics are struggle, fraternities are struggle. Instead of teaching a boy to unlearn all the vicious competitive ways he has acquired from childhood, it reinforces them. Instead of turning his mind inwards, it fills him with ambition. Instead of making him quiet and opening his ears to intuitive understanding, it disturbs him and stifles his inner powers…
… What else could be expected? The teachers – the very ones who should be healing young minds sick with struggle – are sick themselves. Their first concern is not wisdom, but survival in a jousting match. Like creaking champions they have to be ever padding themselves with heavier degrees and the production of thicker books, straining their ears for faculty rumour, sharping their tongues for cleverness and reprisal. Are these the perfected men who should be the teachers of the unperfected?”
– The Parting of the Way, p. 167
Taoist essay from intro book on the tao…
I have no data, but I bet taoists emigrate less often.
