As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything — from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it. Robert M. Pirsig
About This Quote

J. Dewey in the 1920’s began to teach a new way of learning in his classrooms. Instead of teaching a student to think for themselves he wanted to teach them to make a connection with the world around them. This was a completely different way to learn and it created a different type of student.

Source: Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

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