Responding to Miguel Guhlin's Banishing Disillusionment post, Tom Hoffman quotes at length from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd. It's a good quote, looking at what progressive education hoped to achieve and explaining, via the weight of history, why social revolutions such as this are not fulfilled. Someone more technocratic, such as myself, would turn to Thomas Kuhn to find the observation that revolutions are accomplished only via the passing of previous generations. Revolution is romantic, but the reality is that a society is changed only one mind at a time, one heart at a time, and that this is necessarily a slow process, even in an age of rapid change. And while there is great emphasis placed on the great change wrought by revolutionary leaders, the reality is that power, all power, rests and must rest ultimately with the people. That is in itself the revolution I have undertaken to support, one that spans generations and that will continue after I am gone.
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