Education Quote by Bill Lear

Lear’s line is a classic inventor’s complaint: we school people to be competent operators of other people’s systems, then act surprised when they don’t produce original ideas. The phrase “unfortunate things” reads polite, but it’s a quiet indictment of an education model built for standardization and compliance. Lear isn’t merely praising daydreaming; he’s pointing at a structural mismatch between how creativity actually happens and how students are trained to perform knowledge on demand.

The key move is “avail themselves.” He treats the subconscious like an underused tool - something practical, almost mechanical - rather than a mystical inner voice. That framing makes sense from a man who built a career by turning hunches into hardware. Lear’s subtext: invention is not just IQ and technique; it’s pattern-recognition, intuition, and the ability to let problems “work” in the background until a solution clicks. Schools grade the foreground (the visible steps), while the subconscious does its best work offstage.

Context matters. Lear came up in a 20th-century America obsessed with engineering, aviation, and mass production, where education increasingly resembled an assembly line: timed tests, right answers, measurable outcomes. His critique lands because it anticipates today’s creativity crisis: students optimized for rubrics and résumé points, adults anxious when faced with open-ended problems.

He’s also smuggling in a belief about agency. If students learned to access that quieter cognitive machinery - through reflection, play, sleep, meditation, unstructured tinkering - they’d be less dependent on external instruction and more capable of self-directed breakthroughs.