Drones and Worker Bees

Education and Civilisation

From time to time I, as a professor in a public university, receive a form from the legislature asking me to make an account of the hours I spend working.  I think someone ought to send a form like that to the legislators.  The comparison might be very interesting.  The faculty in my acquaintance are quite literally devoted to their work, almost obsessive about it.  They go on vacation to do research.  Even when they retire they don't retire.

I have benefited enormously from the generosity of teachers from grade school through graduate school.  They are an invaluable community who contribute as much as legislators do to sustaining civilization, and more than legislators do to equipping the people of this country with the capacity for learning and reflection, and the power that comes with that capacity.

Lately we have been told and told again that our educators are not preparing American youth to be efficient workers.  Workers.  That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 24.]