Ray Bradbury on Why Colleges Are 'Dangerous' to Young Minds
The famous novelist believed universities posed a kind of danger to creators and free-thinking individuals.
As I watch the meltdown of US universities, I couldn’t help but think of Ray Bradbury.
The renowned American author was famously known for his dislike of colleges. He felt that the traditional education system was too rigid and stifling for creative minds. He believed that university students were not encouraged to think independently and explore their own ideas.
He also felt that college professors did not provide enough guidance or feedback to help students develop their creativity. As a result, he saw college as a place where creativity was stifled and discouraged rather than nurtured and inspired.
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In a recent clip on Twitter that went viral, the Fahrenheit 451 author explained that writers in particular should avoid universities, saying at one point “the intellect is a great danger to creativity.”
The response seems to shock the interviewer, prompting Bradbury to elaborate.
“A terrible danger, because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth: who you are, what you are, what you want to be,” Bradbury says. “I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads: don’t think. You must never think at the typewriter, you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.”
Unlike Bradbury, I went to college. I enjoyed my time there and wouldn’t change my experience.
Nevertheless, I think Bradbury is correct about the dangers universities pose to creators and free-thinking individuals. For far too long college, has been treated as something people must do to be successful or accomplished or complete. I think this vision is a mistake.
Even worse, I think universities are actively ruining young minds, infantilizing students, and radicalizing them.
From a standpoint of knowledge unlike so much of the ignorant the rhetoric you hear.
It’s a mixed bag. Yes the universities can instill a conformist ethos.But Bradbury’s , feel don’t think bit , can and is often pushed too far. Let me dish out this old chestnut from ( I think) George Bernard Shaw- people have felt too much and thought too little. I got a fair amount intellectually out of my university and graduate school experience. I would not have been better off without it. Oh and I was saturated in Marxist propaganda ( I even got to see Bertell Ohlman talk about Engel’s dialects of nature). It was good and enabled to me argue