Thread by @simonsarris

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

The world is a very malleable place.

simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-most-pre…

History happens only once, it never repeats. I find it striking just how early, and how varied, the avenues were that allowed one to pivot off-script, to do something differently than everyone else.

For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?

Where are the studios, anyway?

We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim.

The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around. To understand this is to understand the ecology that fosters the unique.

Agency is precious because the lucidities that purposeful work and responsibility bring are the real education. The secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place, we must be sure that people learn this, and never forget the order: Learning is the consequence of doing.

It is The Education of Achilles by Eugène Delacroix, 1862 (pastels on paper)

the centaur Chiron was tasked with raising Achilles, and so Achilles is given an education of doing.

https://twitter.com/Drboudro/status/1410407986879627270

The first line was inspired by @pmarca, from 2007: "The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think."