The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the role of universities in delaying personal growth and societal change.
J. G. Ballard's quote addresses the function of universities, suggesting that instead of fostering maturity and responsibility, they contribute to a prolonged adolescence that can last well into middle age. This situation may lead to a lack of initiative or capability to enact meaningful change in society, highlighting a potential issue within the educational system that prioritizes comfort over growth and action.
In practice
Discussing the shortcomings of higher education during a lecture on societal development.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books.
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
How much more do they deserve our reverence and praise, whose lives are devoted to the formation of institutions, which, when they and their children are mingled in the common dust, may continue to cherish the principles and the practice of liberty in perpetual freshness and vigour.
Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.
Praise your child explicitly for how capable they are of learning rather than telling them how smart they are.
Most organizations see young people as problems to be solved. We see young people as problem-solvers.
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