Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

2.9. Lesson 10: Understand Hands-On: Touch Everything

As an innovative industrialist, Thomas Edison was eager to employ the most talented and best-educated workers he could find. But there was a problem. He diagnosed a crisis in American education, one (he claimed) that often deprived him—and others—of the very best workers. The problem was not a deficiency in the American intellect or an intellectual weakness in the "younger generation," but a defect in the American system of education, which Edison derided as a "relic of past ages," consisting of "parrot-like repetitions," the "dull study of twenty-six hieroglyphs." In a diary entry from January 4, 1914, the inventor complained that "the young of the present" were being condemned to study ...