All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques current educational systems for training conformist individuals who support the status quo.
John Fowles highlights the inherent flaws in our educational systems, suggesting they function like a paramilitary organization designed to produce obedient individuals rather than critical thinkers. He argues that this system primarily benefits those in power who control it and ensure that the education provided aligns with their interests, discouraging innovation and independent thought among learners.
Themes
EducationConformityCritical ThinkingPowerTraining
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about reforms in education systems.
More from John Fowles
All quotes →There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John FowlesRead
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
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The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
John FowlesRead
It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.
John FowlesRead
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Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.
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She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
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We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
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The teacher can seldom afford to miss the questions: What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition? The student should consider the principal parts of the problem attentively, repeatedly, and from from various sides.
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Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
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The progress of the world depends almost entirely upon education.
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