Reading The Souls of Yellow Folk  by Wesley Yang. 

These essays are awesome and I want to try and use in class. Here’s a quote from the profile on Aaron Schwartz that I’m going to process with my students at some point:

As I listened to the tributes to Aaron Swartz in Highland Park and New York and online, this aphorism came to mind. Swartz had skipped out on the lessons taught by the American high school—the lessons in cynical acquiescence, conformity, and obedience to the powers that be. He was right to think these lessons injure people’s innate sense of curiosity and morality and inure them to mediocrity. He was right to credit his “arrogance” for the excellence of the life he lived. But if nothing else, these lessons prepare people for a world that can often be met in no other way; a world whose irrational power must sometimes simply be endured. This was a lesson that he contrived never to learn, which was part of what made him so extraordinary. 

Certainly not all high schools. I hope. Or at least not all of the time.