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external vs. internal discipline ::
My wife frequents some homeschooling discussion boards on AOL. Every sufficiently diverse community has subjects which never die, and theirs is no exception. In the perennial disagreements between structured homeschoolers and “unschoolers,” the following was said:
If we were to search hard enough, most of the ‘great’ minds or those known for creative genius will be discovered to have a great deal of structure and discipline in their life - and it didn’t douse their inner fires!
Somewhere there is a list of famous people who dropped out of school, not the least of whom was Albert Einstein. Perhaps he had structure and discipline in his life, but if he did, it was something he created for himself, certainly not something he learned in school.
He was far more interested in his private pursuits outside of school than his classes. His genius was a product of his own impassioned pursuit, not a product of any discipline or structure imposed on him externally.
We went to high school with a girl who was an absolute prodigy on the violin; everyone was convinced she would be a famous musician when she grew up. We ran into her a few years ago and asked if she was still playing. She said no, playing the violin was something her parents had all but forced her to do; she had never really liked it.
(added April 10)
In “For the Love of Hockey” (Chris McDonell, Firefly Books, Buffalo, NY 1997), Wayne Gretzky says:
Parents come up to me now saying, “We’d like you to tell our son that he has to practice hockey the way you did, for six, seven, or eight hours a day.” I tell them that’s not my philosophy. It really wasn’t practice, it was fun. ... If I had considered it practice, I would not have done it. It’s human nature to be a little rebellious when someone tells us we have to do something. A lot of what I do comes from within. ...”
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