ABSTRACT
Persons who are trained exclusively in techniques prefer to do only the things that can be done with the techniques that they have learned rather than to tackle jobs that may be more important but that are unresponsive to their existing tools, like a surgeon insisting on using his scalpel to dig away a snowdrift. Perhaps the greatest single defect of our educational organization is that it creates a situation in which the skills of learning and the amount actually learned are competitive goods and in which all the payoffs are for learning something on the spot rather than for acquiring the capability of learning in the future. An intellectual subculture within which a young person can get recognition and promotion for pointing out successfully where any of his colleagues, particularly his older colleagues, have made mistakes. Taxonomy is usually a convenience of the human mind rather than a description of reality.
