“Teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge.
“It is a crucial distinction. In other words, I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.
“I no longer felt comfortable defining my work as bestowing wisdom on a struggling classroom audience. Although I continue to this day in those futile assays because of the nature of institutional teaching, wherever possible I have broken with teaching tradition and sent kids down their separate paths to their own private truths.”
– John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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“When I started producing [minimalism] was my thing… my first record actually says, instead of produced by Rick Rubin, it says, ‘reduced by Rick Rubin.’…”
Rick Rubin, as quoted in Rick Rubin in the Studio by Jake Brown
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A system of reduction sounds good.
The less you try to add the quieter your mind can become.
The quieter your mind the more you can hear of your own voice.
If you do wish to add more then better to add something of your own.
Don’t allow yourself to be force-fed.
We don’t want our minds to be used for froie gras.
What’s the benefit of fattening them up?
Better to cultivate a free range mind.
Lean and agile and free.
Conversations With Quotations 