But any proposal for a new law (or for maintaining an old one) should come with a question attached: How many people are you willing to kill to see this enforced?

Years ago, a poor Dutch immigrant boy washed the windows of a bakery shop after school to help support his family. His people were so poor that in addition he used to go out in the street with a basket every day and collect stray bits of coal that had fallen in the gutter where the coal wagons had delivered fuel. That boy, Edward Bok, never got more than six years of schooling in hi life; yet eventually he made himself one of the most successful magazine editors in the history of American journalism. How did he do it? that is a long story, but how he got his start can be told briefly. He got his start by using the principles advocated in this chapter.

He left school when he was thirteen and became an office boy for Western Union, but he didn't for one moment give up the idea of an education. Instead, he started to educate himself. He saved his carfares and went without lunch until he had enough money to buy an encyclopedia of American biography--and then he did an unheard-of thing. He read the lives of famous people and wrote them asking for additional information about their childhoods. He was a good listener. He asked famous people to tell him more about themselves. He wrote General James A. Garfield, who was then running for President, and asked if it was true that he was once a tow boy on a canal; and Garfield replied. He wrote General Grant asking about a certain battle, and Grant drew a map for him and invited this fourteen-year-old boy to dinner and spent the evening talking to him.

Soon our Western Union messenger boy was corresponding with many of the most famous people in the nation; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Louisa May Alcott, General Sherman and Jefferson Davis. Not only did he correspond with these distinguised people, but as soon as he got a vacation, he visited many of them as a welcome guests in their homes. This experience imbued him with a confidence that was invaluable. These men and women fired him with a vision and ambition that shaped his life. and all this, let me repeat, was made possible solely by the application of the principles we are discussing here.

The medieval university degree structures were based on the guild system. In this mileu the bachelor's degree was roughly equivalent to the apprencice, the so-called master's degree was roughly equivalent to the journeyman and the doctor's degree was roughly equivalent to the level of master craftsman, with the doctoral thesis roughly equivalent to the masterpiece. The reason for arranging things this way was to keep knowledge subordinate to the catholic church. It was basically an elaborate filter which was meant to weed out people who were likely to teach heretical ideas before they would become doctors. (Doctor originally meaning teacher.)

Lyell first became aware of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck when he was 26, in 1827. A letter to Mantell reads, in part, as follows:

"I devoured Lamark... his theories delighted me... I am glad that he has been courageous enough and logical enough to admit that his argument, if pushed as far as it must go, if worth anything, would prove that men may have come from the Ourang-Outang. But after all, what changes species may really undergo!... That the Earth is quite as old as he supposes, has long been my creed..."

Her pleading tone, her religious fervor, greatly impressed him, along with the fact that her college entrance examinations had placed her in the upper one percent of the class.

-excerpt from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig
***
Why might that impress him? Pirsig presents us with a number of contradictions in this book. Here, and in Lila, he makes a lot of noise about his own IQ, his own great intelligence and observational powers, though he seems to take sorting categories as a craft and the kinds of things he thinks count as evidence are epistemologically unsophisticated. He seems to rely a lot on gut feelings, and the idea that if someone is smart they are more likely to be right.
His contradictions though, are such as the identification with students who are failing, corroborated in conversations with other teachers the insight that the best students are always failing, because they are wild, untamed, sometimes hurt and vicious. This is because school is not good for them. Yet he also identifies with the top brains, with people like Einstein, and this girl with the high IQ score, but does not see himself as being like the students who go along to get along, the girl with thick glasses behind which lie the eyes of a drudge, who was coming close to failing an assignment because she couldn't think of anything to say and was distraught by her mysterious, unwilling disobedience, her failure to follow orders.
On the other hand, Gatto doesn't believe that IQ tests really measure anything, or that there is any difference in the intelligence of gifted kids or so-called learning-disabled children. He thinks the whole apparent range of mental abilities can almost completely be put down to schools using tracking to separate people with some kinds of backgrounds from others, with a tiny niche of super-schools, with a spare program of hard exercizes designed to build extreme confidence left out by design, to enable an elite to enable their children to take control of society from the top.
Though even what Gatto has said about children from different backgrounds has contradictions. He says at one point that shcool makes children give up, and that poor children give up sooner. Yet he describes such childhood scourges as suicide as being an affliction of the rich, almost exclusively. Apparently he sees some source of strength in the poor life.
Phaedrus supposedly saw his failure from college as innoculating him against feeling the need to please academics. Yet he goes on to teach, as Gatto might say, institutionalizing himself. Placing himself in a kind of artificial world, in which he was the authority figure, connected to the school but allowed to be the focus of immature students in a vacuum each day. This is kind of an ironic reflection since it also happens literally in this book, in the sense of institutionalize that has the greatest colloquial use.