Nearly every educator I've ever learned from has unconsciously insisted that learning material remain sterile, and never become as funny and opinionated as this

Nearly every educator I've ever learned from has unconsciously insisted that learning material remain sterile, and never become as funny and opinionated as this essay. For most students, "learning" is outrageously boring until you get out of college (or into graduate school) and suddenly learn through essays and memoirs that what was presented to you for 12-16 years in a bone-dry format as established gospel truth was actually the life's work of sometimes dozens if not thousands of people, each of whom fought through their own careers, formed their own views on society, joked, married, divorced, died, squabbled, sniped, and felt immense passion for the subjects they ended up distilling into textbooks for us. Much of the information we learn as students was at the time of its discovery controversial in the extreme. A few years ago I experienced a perfect example of this phenomenon in a glassblowing museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts. The museum takes visitors through the history of glassblowing in New England, mostly by static exhibits but also with live glassblowing demonstrations. At one point in the tour I read a placard that said something like "in 17XX, John Newenglishman invented a stamped glass method that allowed for much higher production rates of glass. The already-employed glassblowers resisted this development as it meant infringement on their industry." Then I looked up at the wall and read a quote from John Newenglishman that said something like "after demonstrating my stamped glass method, I hid in my room for weeks... gangs of blower-men hunted for me, no doubt to inform me by force their displeasure with my invention." I am paraphrasing in the extreme, but I was struck by how sanitized the placard was compared to the actual words of J.N. It reminded me of the history textbooks I used to read, which removed all of the flair and human-ness from the teaching of history. If I could change one thing about modern education, I would somehow disabuse students of the notion that the development and archival of information has ever been "regimented" or "unbiased", and take great pains to expose them fully to the tremendous wit and wisdom of the past authors whose work they pore over. Anyway, great essay, saved. (As a somewhat related point, I have also consistently found mathematicians and engineers to be much funnier than artists and authors, with the exception of artists and authors devoted to comedy. Somehow the tragic hilarity of writing math textbooks or working in a late stage engineering company never made its way into the material I was reading about math and engineering until I was out of my aerospace engineering degree by about three years.)