Education Quote by La Monte Young

Education is framed here less like a credential and more like a jailbreak: once the mind learns how to learn, power loses its favorite tool, which is dependency. La Monte Young’s line has the blunt certainty of someone who’s watched systems try to contain imagination and fail anyway. The phrasing is telling. Not “you shouldn’t stop them” but “you can’t,” an almost physical claim about inevitability. Education becomes momentum.

Coming from a composer who helped define musical minimalism, the quote reads like an aesthetic manifesto disguised as civic advice. Young’s work treats sustained attention as a radical act: long tones, deep listening, patience as discipline. That’s education in the broadest sense, not just schoolrooms but training perception until the world sounds different. Once you’ve had that shift, you don’t return easily to passive consumption. You start hearing structure: who gets to speak, who gets to decide, where the silences are.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of institutions that prefer “training” to education. Training produces compliance; education produces agency. In the mid-to-late 20th-century American context, when mass media, Cold War orthodoxies, and cultural gatekeeping all competed to define “normal,” experimental art carried an implicit political charge. Young isn’t offering a slogan about personal uplift. He’s pointing at the fear behind censorship, underfunded schools, and anti-intellectualism: an educated public is harder to script.

It’s also an artist’s brag with a moral edge. Give people the tools to perceive and they’ll keep composing their own lives, whether authorities applaud or not.