Making education artificially easy distorts the training needed for genuine intellectual work.
Evidence
In the future, these questions may become extremely acute and it will be necessary to resist the tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted. If our aim is to produce a new stratum of intellectuals, including those capable of the highest degree of specialisation, from a social group which has not traditionally developed the appropriate attitudes, then we have unprecedented difficulties to overcome. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 370
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Resonates with the scaffolding theory this reader is building — Gramsci insists difficulty is constitutive of the discipline, not an obstacle to be smoothed away.