Consider: “Whatever be the qualifications of your tutors, your improvement must chiefly depend on yourselves. They cannot think or labor for you, they can only put you in the best way of thinking and laboring for yourselves. If therefore you get knowledge you must acquire it by your own industry. You must form all conclusions and all maxims for yourselves, from premises and data collected and considered by yourself. And it is the great object of [our educational institutions] to remove every bias the mind may be under, and to give the greatest scope for true freedom of thinking.”
Don’t you wish—as I dearly do—that this were written in stone above the formal entranceway to our federal Department of Education? Alas, it is not!
Oh, so you wonder what hippie educator penned-spoke the above? Answer:
The renowned scientist Joseph Priestly.
Date: 1794.
Occasion: speech at the dedication of New College, London.
Talk about timeless/timely!
In an Age of Creativity!
(Which this is.)