Looking Critically at Our Energy Policy
Today’s the birthday of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. According to the Writer’s Almanac, when he was 17 and in his freshman year at Columbia University, Ginsberg was introduced to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, whom Ginsberg later said encouraged him to think for himself and to worry less about conforming.
Of course, Western Culture had been flirting with non-conformist thinking since its inception (Socrates comes immediately to mind), yet I think it could be properly said that the beat poets “institutionalized” the concept, in a way, at least here in the US. Does anyone still believe that a good education is one in which millions of unanalyzed facts are stuffed into our heads? (more…)