[saraid216]

Disillusionment with age seems a relatively universal phenomenon. There is no end to stories about humorless elders in any part of the world, at any point in remembered history.

> More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open.

I think that the problem is actually in how society looks at schools, rather than schools themselves. We think of it like a machine, to be kept fueled and oiled, into which we can feed empty buckets and get them filled. We try not to get involved in the actual machinery, which is full of loud noises and creaking cogs. We expect magic. We expect numbers. We expect efficiency. We expect standards. And this is wrong, all wrong.

Curiosity dies when boundaries are perceived as absolute. If you push at a wall, and it doesn't budge, you stop pushing. It has given you a response, and it's a boring response; you lose interest. You stop being curious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have absolute boundaries, but it does mean we need to give serious thought to why each boundary exists.