Words&Dirt

“‘Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I remember hearing that.  Primitive stuff.  Age of Scarcity.’

‘People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off.  So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral––’

‘Money.  Technical term.’”

––Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 14

“The heart of the sociality of man is in education.  The idea of education as preparation and of adulthood as a fixed limit of growth are two sides of the same obnoxious untruth.  If the moral business of the adult as well as the young is a growing and developing experience, then the instruction that comes from social dependencies and interdependencies are as important for the adult as for the child.  Moral independence for the adult means arrest of growth, isolation means induration.  We exaggerate the intellectual dependence of childhood so that children are too much kept in leading strings, and then we exaggerate the independence of adult life from intimacy of contacts and communication with others.  When the identity of the moral process with the processes of specific growth is realized, the more conscious and formal education of childhood will be seen to be the most economical and efficient means of social advance and reorganization, and it will also be evident that the test of all the institutions of adult life is their effect in furthering continued education.  Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning, a purpose.  That purpose is to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status.  And this is all one with saying that the test of their value is the extent to which they educate every individual into the full stature of his possibility.  Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 185-6