In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.
Interpretation
Adapting too well to school can hinder real-world adaptability, suggesting that struggles in school may foster better life skills.
Philip K. Dick's quote implies that the traditional educational system may stifle one's ability to cope with real-life challenges. He argues that those who do not conform too rigidly to school expectations may emerge as better equipped to handle the complexities of the world beyond academia. His perspective highlights a critique of the educational system that rewards compliance over critical thinking and adaptability.
In practice
This quote can spark a discussion on the effectiveness of education systems at a seminar on teaching methodologies.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.
The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.
Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
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