The Stigma of Genius: Einstein and Beyond Modern Education

Taking as their metaphor the young Albert Einstein, who as a child was alternately ridiculed and dismissed by his teachers as an inattentive and unteachable student, three of our nation's noted educators attack the entire philosophy which has guided our public schools throughout the twentieth century, a system of education and thinking essentially grounded in the Newtonian-Cartesian concepts of a static world.
The authors decry a system which is governed by a work-ethic determined to turn out students much as one uses cookie-cutter molds or industrial lathes. They show how these educational concepts have deadened the consciousness of generations of children and led to American public schools with teachers who too often "deny the role of passion and emotion in their professional lives."
The Stigma of Genius speaks to all of us - teachers, students, parents, citizens. In 1938 Einstein wrote "knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men." This is a manifesto for an end to deadening convention, corporate bureaucracy, and standardized students in our public schools; and for a restoration of the flame of curiosity, diversity, and value systems, based not on a pre-ordained order, but in the heart and mind of students with the freedom to think and question for themselves.