I’ve been thinking much about Dina’s last post on motivation, and my stewing led me back to something I read along time ago (like four years) in graduate school. If you’ve never read this, check this piece out by John Taylor Gatto, “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher“. My favorite quote:

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

I’ll be writing more about this soon, when I get some time over break. Maybe.