We have built institutions that teach people how to think, then reward them for knowing when not to.
Tag: higher education
A system that discourages difference eventually undermines its own capacity to learn, adapt and survive.
Doctoral research promises original thought, but the institutional machinery that recognises and rewards knowledge systematically reproduces precisely that ignorance it exists to supersede.
The paradox is that philosophy, a discipline nominally concerned with questioning assumptions, has become remarkably accomplished at preserving its own.
I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
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Universities still teach Socrates, but only rarely entertain the genuine institutional risk that his intellectual integrity signifies.
