Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Wright criticizes Harvard for taking promising students and making them rigid or dried up, using the metaphor of plums turning into prunes.
- In plain terms
- Harvard takes great students and makes them less vibrant.
- What can you take from it?
- Elite education can sometimes suppress a student's natural vitality.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Does education nurture or constrain?
- What happens to potential in elite schools?
Another view
It reduces complex educational outcomes to a single negative metaphor.
More from Frank Lloyd Wright
Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
Permalink to quote #45 He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head.
Permalink to quote #47 Get the habit of analysis - analysis will, in time, enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
Permalink to quote #44
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