I am talking with Linus Gren one of the 70 000 young people in Sweden that were out of school, out of job out of social service for more than 2 years. He left high school because it could not understand him and school was not about knowledge or his ability to learn but what was valued was his ability to obey.

You will meet a young man, 23 years old who within less than one hour make reference to Edna St Vincent Millay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Eugene Field, Lewis Carroll, Wilfred Owen, George Orwell, Charles Bukowski, Steven Robinson, John Locke, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Berkeley, Arthur Schopenhauer, Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Seldes, Hunter S. Thompson, H. L. Mencken, Henry Miller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Akari Kurosawa and J. R. Tolkien.

Staying at “home” without television and radio, but with a connection to the internet and a computer, he reached out to the world through the English language. Linus is a young man that was not helped having homework, since there was no one there to help him -not with the homework but help him away from anxiety. Our school is to be equal how can it be equal unless we have a society that is fair.

Thank you Linus for letting me be part of your sharing and thank you for providing me with this gorgeous passage from Steven Robinson’s, and not as he said in the podcast Robert Jonson, introduction to your copy of Juvenal’s ”Sixteen Satires”:

“An interest in others, an appetite for life, a sensitivity to the needs and promptings of the spirit: as these grow, so is realized the humanity that is potentially always ours. So is experienced the profundity that was always in experience, as we move from what is coarsest, readiest, strongest, simplest–toward the finest, least accessible, faintest, most complex. For the latter are all in some sort refinements of the earlier perceptions, closer approximations of the same object. They depend on a certain reach of sensibility having been attained before them, as through a beaten track into territory half-explored.”