I don’t care much for the dangerous, fanatical organization that rose up around the Indian-born spiritual leader Osho. (For that matter, I don’t care much for the various dangerous, fanatical organizations that have risen up around the Christian spiritual leader, Jesus.)
That said: I do enjoy reading Osho’s books on creativity, spirituality, and philosophy, which often aspire to a level of enlightenment and insight that the man himself, perhaps, never achieved. Last night, while reading Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within, I came across a quote that, once you fiddle with the line breaks, makes a great prose poem on education’s ability to crush the sort of risk-taking that goes hand-in-hand with creative genius:
Teachers are always reinforcing
that you should be recognized,
you should be accepted.
This is a very cunning strategy to
keep people under control.
So true: the constant pressure to earn awards and achieve recognition does little more than assure students will produce only what people are already primed to appreciate. Anything that radically breaks with tradition is unlikely to be well received.
Worse, a competitive educational environment — stressing the value of recognition and praise from others — very quickly converts students into “attention addicts.”
I saw this first-hand while taking college-level creative writing classes: in a room where those who write the house’s style of fiction are praised and those who depart from that pattern are ignored, student authors quickly abandon developing their own styles and start producing “house fiction.”
Once you start pandering for praise, it’s easy to spend your entire life doing so — in every area of your life. You only produce the books you think the market will adore. You create only the relationships you think society will support.
Today, why not break out from under the tyranny of popular opinion? Do something — anything — without critiquing it. Create something — anything — without worrying about whether or not the market will buy it. Think thoughts — any thoughts — without obsessing over whether or not those thoughts are acceptable.
Teachers will frown. The public at large will shake their heads and murmur.
But you? You’ll be on your way to an entirely different way of living.
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