I found this strolling along the “Freedom Trail” in Boston today, from Benjamin Franklin:

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

—-Benjamin Franklin

Refreshing for me since American responses to education are so deeply anti-intellectual (even pragmatism– our only real contribution to philosophy–doubts the efficacy of learning.  Anyway,  experience too often is another name for prejudice, a form of justification that verges on narcissism, believing that if it isn’t true to my own experience it isn’t true at all.  The dream of reading, true or false, has at least sometimes included the notion that we can see beyond our own experience into the experience of others, that my own experience may be a starting point, but left in it I am left to my own limitations.

Side note:  I have to say I love Boston.  I’ve never spent more than a few hours in the city itself, once on a visit years ago after graduating from college, and then a few years ago for an afternoon with my parents.  A school on every street corner, it seems.  A place where walking is its own entertainment.

Advent of Revolution

One question, what is the deal with Dunkin Donuts?  Did they start here?  There are more dunkin donuts than pictures of patriots, and that’s saying something.  According to boston.com “there are 1100 Dunkin’ Donuts within a 50-mile radius of Boston.  So far as I can tell it doesn’t affect the waistlines, but watch out Boston.