"A primary purpose of school - and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well - is to lead us away from our own experience. The proc… - Derrick Jensen

"A primary purpose of school - and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well - is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities."

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About Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen (born 19 December 1960) is an American author and environmental activist who lives in Northern California.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Derrick Jensen

Par où commencer ? Par remettre en question les croyances irréfléchies, qui sont les véritables autorités de cette culture. Une fois que vous aurez entamé ce processus de questionnement, mon travail sera terminé : une fois que ces questions commencent à être posées, elles sont inarrêtables. La suite dépend de vous.

Last December I saw an advertisement outside an electronics store. There was a little boy, delirious with delight, surrounded by computers, stereos, and other gadgets. The text read: “We know what your child wants for Christmas.” I stared at the poster, then said to no one in particular, “What your child wants for Christmas is your love, but if he can’t get that, he’ll settle for a bunch of electronic crap.

The shock doctrine also perfectly describes the entire bright green movement: Because of a terrible and very real disaster (in this case, climate change), you need to hand over huge subsidies to a sector of the industrial economy, and you need to let us destroy far more of the natural world, from Baotou to the Mojave Desert to the bottom of the ocean. If you don’t give us lots of money and let us destroy far more of the natural world, you will lose the luxuries that are evidently more important to you than life on the planet.

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