O elogio da educaçao formal

JM Coetzee por David Levine no New York Review of Books

Coetzee escreve no New York Review of Books (tradução no Libération de quinta-feira) uma extensa referência ao último livro de Norman Mailer (The Castle in the Forest). O livro aborda uma questão relativamente desinteressante: o mal está connosco desde o nascimento ou há um momento em que o demónio nos possui. na mesma ocasião é publicada a última investigação que o grupo de Damásio continua a produzir sobre as bases neurofisiológicas do julgamento e da acção moral. (Nature, só o resumo está disponível no processo acelerado de privatização da net.)
Depois de descrever o período de Viena na vida de Hitler e a influência que nele tiveram charlatões agora esquecidos, como Guido von List( a supremacia ariana) e Lanz von Liebenfels ( a misoginia violenta), Coetzee escreve as seguintes linhas que devem ser lidas como o elogio da educação formal:

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks.