I think the main thing I learned in school was how bad regimentation is. I also got a good idea from it of how society works: the good are rewarded, the bad and the superior, not.

Not that schools are not of value to a society. We need them to free adults from children for at least part of most days. They are effective as conformity factories, too, for they do succeed fairly well in properly indoctrinating the less intelligent (who do need guidance, else they can get in the way of others, and even sometimes cause damage)--and in innoculating the intelligent against indoctrination. So far as valid learning goes, I believe schools can and often do attract genuine teachers to work in them, and facilitate the storage and use of valuable learning tools like books and computers. Hence, they can make certain kinds of learning easier and more fun for the few capable of significant learning.

Schools also provide employment for certain kinds of people unable to do anything else society would be willing to pay them for (I'm one such)--until they've been dead a generation or more, especially in colleges. Speaking of colleges, they are probably essential, not for teaching, but because of the way even our relatively free society is set up, some kind of official institutions are necessary for licensing, and for funding certain kinds of expensive research--in astronmy, for instance. They would not be required in a free society, but a free society is probably an impossible ideal, at least for a few more centuries.

Just yakking because I didn't have anything much to say today. I'm feeling okay but empty and sluggish, who knows why. I had decided that I was going to come down on Larry Niven, well-known sci fi writer, for something he said. I got going about schools because I couldn't find the passage I wanted to come down on Niven for in his Scatterbrain, which I've been reading with enjoyment, and learning from. What happened was that I wanted to say that one thing I should have learned from schools but didn't because of my stubbornness and conceit was the practice of marking passages in books I expected to want to refer to later. Stubbornness kept me from learning any dull "proper scholarly practice," conceit from thinking a person with so wonderful a memory as I could remember everything important he read. I almost could when young, and narrow-minded enough not to have many competing memories. Conceit played another role in my foolishness: it made me think that only plodders needed to research anything to learn the essentials about anything. I still look down on standard empirical research. If that's all a verosopher (seeker of truth) does, he won't get far. But if he never does it, he will also be handicapped--if never (in my view) as much.

So, what did Niven say? Something about his works having no need for critics--because they either conveyed everything he wanted them to clearly to their readers in which case criticism wasn't necessary, or they didn't, in which case, presumably, they weren't worth criticizing. Who knows if that's really what he said or meant. No matter: it's absurd. It's absurd because it assumes a writer can know everything important about his work. He can't. It's up to the critic to put a given work in context with like works in its field. Put it into history, and sociology. And to reveal its mechanics, something a literary engagent need not know about, but there are other valid ways of engaging a work, in this case technically. That can set up an analysis of it as a product of the human creative process.

A critic can also use a work he analyzes as the subject of his own work--the way a novelist may use a person or group of people as the subject of his work.

My simple point, one I'm frequently making, is that critics are as important as "creative" writers.