Linchpin by Seth Godin

Lots has been written about Seth Godin, and much has been written by him; some people love what he has to say, others have a favourite book and find his other works "very similar".   Whether you love him or not, one of the key principles in his books is creative thinking, perhaps more colloquially refered to as "thinking outside of the box".  Many of the ideas he presents are controversial, although less so more recently; and one of my favourite topics is when he talks about schools and universities as they exist today being rooted in the premise that we need to create lots of little cogs that make the big machine work as whole.

Here's an excerpt from the book (reproduced with permission, thanks Seth),

Does School Work?
If I drill and practice and grade and reward you for years on doing math with fractions, what are the chances that you’ll learn fractions? School does a great job of teaching students to do what we set out to teach them. It works. The problem is that what we’re teaching is the wrong stuff.
Here’s what we’re teaching kids to do (with various levels of success):
Fit in
Follow instructions
Use #2 pencils
Take good notes
Show up every day
Cram for tests and don’t miss deadlines
Have good handwriting
Punctuate
Buy the things the other kids are buying
Don’t ask questions
Don’t challenge authority
Do the minimum amount required so you’ll have time to work on another subject
Get into college
Have a good résumé
Don’t fail
Don’t say anything that might embarrass you
Be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback
Participate in a large number of extracurricular activities
Be a generalist
Try not to have the other kids talk about you
Once you learn a topic, move on 

Now, the key questions:
Which of these attributes are the keys to being indispensable?
Are we building the sort of people our society needs?
The problem doesn’t lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead.
Here’s what Woodrow Wilson said about public education:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

After retaining brutal Pinkerton men, trainloads of strikebreakers, and even the National Guard to violently put down strikes, Andrew Carnegie decided that the answer to worker unrest was a limited amount of education. “Just see, wherever we peer into the first tiny springs of the national life, how this true panacea for all the ills of the body politic bubbles forth—education, education, education.”
The model is simple. Capitalists need compliant workers, workers who will be productive and willing to work for less than the value that their productivity creates. The gap between what they are paid and what the capitalist receives is profit.
The best way to increase profit was to increase both the productivity and the compliance of factory workers. And as Carnegie saw, the best way to do that was to build a huge educational-industrial complex designed to teach workers just enough to get them to cooperate.
It’s not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don’t fit in, rebel—and you are kicked out of the system.

Seth's book proposes treating our endeavours, work, jobs as art, to work creatively, and encourages creative thinking to make your work, more inspired, more fulfilling, not just for yourself, but to affect those around you too; to be inspired and be inspiring to others. To think creatively about what you do, see it objectively and ask yourself is this the best way to approach the situation or is the fundamental approach flawed due to dogma, staid, simply because "we've always done it this way".  As the Buddhists say, "there is no good work or bad work, there is only work; and our prejudices, biases and thoughts colour it so". Seth challenges you to challenge yourself.  Buy a copy, and challenge your own status quo; decide for yourself if you want your kids growing up to be Linchpins, or Cogs?