Education Quote by Simon Newcomb

Newcomb’s image lands like a woodworking insult: education as a planing mill, shaving raw timber into smooth sameness. It’s not a gentle complaint about “schools these days.” It’s an indictment of an industrial logic creeping into intellectual life in the late 19th century, when mass schooling and standardized curricula were expanding alongside factories and bureaucracies. The metaphor does the heavy lifting: planing makes boards market-ready by erasing irregularities, and Newcomb casts “knots” not as defects but as the stubborn grain where genius lives.

The specific intent is to warn that systems built for throughput and uniform measurement will treat exceptional minds as processing problems. “If my impressions are correct” is a mathematician’s hedge, but it’s also rhetorical camouflage: he softens the claim just enough to make it harder to dismiss as elitist nostalgia. Then he hits with “cuts down all the knots of genius,” a phrase that flips common sense. Schools pride themselves on smoothing weaknesses; Newcomb argues they’re sanding off strengths - the odd fixations, the noncompliant questions, the impatience with rote method.

The subtext is about power. Standardization is never neutral; it rewards those who already match the template and forces everyone else to spend their energy conforming. Newcomb, working in an era that increasingly professionalized science, is signaling a fear that credentialing will replace curiosity. The real target isn’t education as learning, but education as manufacturing: a pipeline optimized for “the same standard,” where the brightest end up merely well-finished.