"Biological determinism is one of psychology’s ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue."

"As we as a society become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realized we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative — the cinema, pop, theater, opera — or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need."

"Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment."

"Being an intellectual begins w/ thinking your way outside of your assumptions & the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work w/in the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there."

"What happens when busyness & sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection…is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, & the essential precondition for introspection is solitude…one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not w/in an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"…graduate of UCSC…has used technology as a sword for social change in a career dedicated to helping empower the dis-advantaged. He will bring his experience directing non-profit organizations not only to A Word with You Press, but to Kid Expression, our sister program housed in the same facilities here in Oceanside. (For those of you new to the site, Kid Expression is our non-profit program to help young writers become accomplished authors.)<br />
<br />
When Morgan was five I delivered him to his first day of school in Borneo (Hey, Barack did his first year in school there, too, and was also an advocate for social justice before he got his current paying gig). I handed him over to the principal & kindergarten teacher in the American school with these instructions: “Do your best to teach him to conform, & I will do my best to teach him not to.” Morgan grew into manhood living with that paradox, & will bring a lot to our site."

"An intimate look at a group of elite Beijing high-school students reveals how China's schooling system is one of the resurgent nation's greatest strengths--and biggest weaknesses."<br />
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""The gaokao rewards a special type of student: very strong memory; very strong logical and analytical ability; little imagination; little desire to question authority," says Jiang Xueqin, a Yale-educated school administrator in Beijing. "That person does well on the gaokao--as well as on the SAT, by the way.""<br />
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"A few prominent Chinese have become icons for those who argue that the gaokao should not be the sole route to success. Writer and businessman Luo Yonghao never took it; ironically, he later made his fortune on a chain of TOEFL and GRE test-prep centers. Perhaps the most famous example is Han Han, a high-school dropout who is the modern paragon of the Chinese renaissance man--a race-car driver, novelist, singer, and the most widely read blogger in the world."

Caterina covers several topics as she talks about hacking the organization and ‘going rogue’: intrinsic motivation, passion, conformism, control, schools, learning, entrepreneurship, organizations, systems, leadership, etc.

"There is still this sense that Americans are unwilling to break away from what they know. Maybe the idea brought by Gurdjieff & Ouspensky that “man is asleep” & that until he awakens, he cannot do other than what he does.…<br />
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At the same time there is some of the most brilliant innovation going on all around the world. There are people actively involved in trying to find ways for a different sort of life. One that is simpler, less encumbered by the old trappings and material desires…<br />
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A free school can be a strange place if you are not used to it. And if you still carry desires of wanting in some way to conform to the old, than it can be a shock. And if you realistically find your self pulled in both directions, then you need to learn to surrender to trust. Not trust the system, because in reality, there is no system. But trust the child’s basic instinct to want to know their world. Maybe our role is to free them from that radio band I spoke of. Let them tune into themselves."

"If you don't love what yo do - you are not in the element. This is in short the message of Sir Ken Robinson's latest book." [Interview here: http://blip.tv/file/3862851 ]

"If every rightwing thinktank came up w/ a scheme to distract populace from political injustice & compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. & in tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

"The “same page” climate means that only the crankiest, most out-there gadflies have the guts to question or criticize, which is not as productive as an honest dialogue among everyone."

"They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic. ... Whitehead and Richerson's models highlight the perils of cultural conformism in red-noise environments, particularly when populations are small, but also show how other styles of learning can mitigate the problems. For instance, 'prestige bias' means that people only copy successful role models, rather than simply imitating what everyone else is doing. "Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, and the models for social learning should be individuals who have demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental trends," says Whitehead."

"I realize how hard it is to find good employees, and how hard it is to evaluate prospective employees from their résumés — that snap judgments from limited information must be made. But this makes it sound like Mayer still uses SAT scores and college grade-point averages to judge current Google employees being considered for promotion.