As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural pench

As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine." But there's a problem: to really learn something deeply, you have to do hard work; it's not all just fun + creativity to grok the inner-workings of a microprocessor (or whatever you're into). So you get forced to go down these paths, with lots of work along the way, so you can finally understand something deep. Only then can you innovate, because you have a solid understanding of the state of the art. Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous. The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.