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.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.
Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.
Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
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