Maria Popova
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And instead I find myself in this...
factory model of education with the 400-person lecture hall and the PowerPoint slides.
And very quickly, I realized, oh, no, they're going to teach me how to take standardized tests.
This is what's happening here in order to be a better cog in the corporate machine later.
And I just felt so betrayed, and I felt so stuck.
And I was working so hard for this very unsatisfying education.
So then I started...
Just going to the library at night on my own, blindly trying to figure out where those answers were.
I would like pull down Aristotle and Susan Sontag.
I'd never heard of who was this person.
And I just sort of cobbled it together and I kept a record of what I was reading.
So meanwhile, one of my four jobs was at this little creative agency.
This was in Philadelphia.
That's where I lived my first bit in the U.S.
The agency was founded by a wonderful man named Steve O'Connell, who had become very famous very young because he had conducted the first effective anti-smoking campaign in history.
The Truth Campaign.
I don't know if you remember from the American Legacy Foundation.
It's very smart, which is that all previous anti-smoking campaigns used fear appeal.
Don't do this.
Bad things are going to happen.