Nick Sousanis - Unflattening-Harvard University Press (2015)

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are put in boxes and become
"lifeless, colorless, dissociated from the context of the
universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs
of the dead. We are born with that God-given gift
of taking delight in the world, but such delightful
activity is fettered and imprisoned, muted by a force
called discipline which kills the sensitiveness of the
child mind which is always on the alert, restless
and eager to receive first-hand knowledge from
mother nature. We sit inert, like dead specimens
of some museum, while lessons are pelted at
us from on high, like hail stones on flowers"
(Tagore, 1966, pp. 213-214).
)V\fv-..1.~
{, /b 0"1-t.f) Page 11: An allusion to a splash page from a Batman
· comic I read as a child. I made the sketch first and felt a trace
of recognition. I tracked down the image, which turned out
to be two different images, one on the cover and the other on the
inside splash page, in which Batman's profile also contains a scene
within; both images are from Detective Comics 457 vol. 1,
published in 1975.
Page 12: A visual reference to Illich (1972), "the
fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea
that one person's judgment should determine what and
when another person must learn" (p. 42).
Pages 16-17: I first used tops as metaphorical standins
for people in my piece for Maxine Greene's class.
It appears in the 2010 book Dear Maxine: Letters from an
Unfinished Conversation, edited by Robert Lake.
INTERLUD E: FLATlAND
Page 22-23: Text from the Flatlander sequence is derived nearly directly
or paraphrased from Abbott's original1884 novel.
Page 25: Hermes is (among other things) the god of boundaries and
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