Parenting & Family Quote by William Wiley

Wiley’s line lands like a field report from the front lines of conformity: the enemy isn’t boredom, it’s “being educated,” a phrase he twists into something nearly synonymous with “brainwashed.” Coming from a soldier, the provocation has extra bite. Military life runs on drilled obedience and standardized response; he’s seen what institutions can do when they prize compliance over improvisation. So when he talks about kids as “pretty good artists,” he’s not idealizing childhood as magical. He’s pointing to a practical truth: play is a form of competence, a fast feedback loop where failure is cheap and curiosity is rewarded.

The rhetoric is deliberately blunt and accumulative. “Artists and dancers and singers and poets” stacks identities the way a recruiter might list roles, except his list is expansive, non-hierarchical, and anti-credential. It suggests that creativity isn’t a rare gene but a default setting, distributed widely until it’s trained out. “Buried” is the key verb: not destroyed, not disproven, just covered over. That implies recoverability, a kind of cultural exhumation.

“Educated, or brainwashed” is the cynical hinge. He collapses schooling’s stated mission (developing minds) into its shadow mission (producing manageable citizens). The subtext isn’t anti-learning; it’s anti-system. He’s aiming at curricula that reward the single correct answer, discipline that punishes noise, and evaluation that turns risk-taking into a liability. The quote works because it forces a moral choice: do we want schools that cultivate original humans, or efficient units who can follow orders without asking what they’re for?