‘The only reason to go to school, that I can see, is to make friends whom you love and like. If you’re lucky, you find something that really interests you. You’ve got to learn to read and write and basic numeracy and so on, but, other than that, it’s absolutely pointless to teach children things that they’re not interested in. The education system needs to factor that in. I remember one of my daughter’s teachers saying to me, “She only works at the subjects she’s interested in.” I was thinking, Great! That would be the point. You go to school, and teachers offer you the things they think are good, but you choose them. It’s always true that the student chooses the teacher.’
This is an extract from Sameer Padania’s 2010 interview with the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips for Bomb Magazine. The full text of the interview can be found at http://bombmagazine.org/article/3623/adam-phillips
