Education often … makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

— Henry David Thoreau (American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist, 1817 – 1862), in his Journals, October/November 1850