The Drop Out.

People who conform cannot really be said to have High Standards. They just have low standards for individual thought.  Conversely, genuinely self-motivated people tend to over shoot the expectations of their instructors. This was why Winston Smith remarked that one of the most loyal members of the Party would be exterminated. He was such an over-achiever that his controllers felt threatened. They knew that over a long enough time the most loyal student sees through the master. So the most brilliant students either break down within the walls of the school, unable to follow to conclusion what their teachers had dictated without falling into the hypocrisy of their peers, or they leave, rebelling against that hypocrisy with disgust rather than allowing their selves to feel that disgust with their selves. They would much rather be victims than oppressors.

Obviously, if one reads Thoreau and does one's extra credit, one might find one's self living alone some where without a stable job or concern for authority. his critics who would accuse him of taking the curriculum too far would be met with an indictment of the curriculum: Why must we read him if he is not worthy of being understood completely? The district can hide behind Schopenhauer's plaint, that they did not endeavour to unravel the mysteries of the Universe for any one who so felt entitled to such an unraveling. But what about the murkier mysteries of the school bureaucracy? Why did it choose Thoreau of all people, but only to honor one or two passages from his work? Why do they insist upon imposing their paradigm upon young minds, yet they either edit out or systematically ignore and implicitly REJECT the rest of him and every other thinker that they espouse? was this not why to this day Nietzsche is still the first result in Google Images when one searches "Nazi Philosopher"? Neitszsche was the ultimate anti-Fascist, but his works were systematically edited in this same fashion to serve the hegemony of the Nazis. So we are obligated as children who pledged daily and compulsorily to a flag that stood for "freedom" (though of course the hypocrisy of making this compulsory was so thinly veiled that now many children are only implicitly pressured to do so.) to question the very motives of the system that pushed these ideals upon us. And if our conclusions obligate us to leave or to disrupt the system, we will only be doing our homework by so doing.

Dm.A.A.