'I'm a Saboteur.'

Yes. The attitude toward these children in liberal New York City wasn't remotely like the attitude toward children in western Pennsylvania, where I grew up. There the assumption was that if somebody couldn't do the work, it was because they were lazy or defiant. In these schools, the assumption was that some kids were permanently disabled, and everyone had to settle into their assigned place.

So I told the people at the ad agency that I was going to leave to teach full time. I thought I'd be right back. I said to myself, I'm going to do this for a year or two and I'm going to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction, that these rules of classification are nonsense. Thirty years later, I still hadn't found out how far it was possible to push human beings to become big, self-directing, independent, and able to write their own script. The trouble is, especially with poor kids, they have such an indoctrinated belief that they can't do it, and that belief is reflected in antagonism and anger that they carry with them throughout life. But the truth is that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

How do you unlock that inborn genius?

When the mind is tested against something unfamiliar, it grows in front of your eyes. Adopted children have a horrible track record in adult life, and yet they often measure on IQ tests about 20 points higher than their equals in their biological family. For years, the medical community tried to figure out what could account for this. Just to transfer from your natural parent increases your intelligence? Well, sure. You're in this desperate situation; you don't even have enough language to find your way out. You're looking around a lot more than you would if it was all Mother Goose.

Does this mean getting kids out of the classroom?

Yes, often it does. I had a standing contract with the kids. I said, If there's something that you want to know how to do, you can pick my brain privately, and I will help you see the best way to do it, even if I don't approve. At one school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, seven girls came to me indignant that a local planning board had voted down Yoko Ono's request to have a John Lennon memorial in Central Park. I agreed with the board. Parks are for trees. But I told the girls that if they wanted to take on the commission to overturn the decision, that could be their project. I warned them that the odds were 10,000 to 1 against them. But they were intent. They researched the commissioners, targeted the ones whose votes they could get, and drummed up press. You know what? They did it. The memorial is called "Strawberry Fields" and it's in Central Park.

At every school where I taught, I told kids that as long as they would do 90% of the work, and as long as the idea was there, and as long as they'd sit still for my lectures about the nuances of the idea, then I was willing to be their assistant. The major access road to self-development is raw experience, but schools often deny that to students. Memorizing notes off the board is not real work. Overthrowing a political dynasty that doesn't want a horrible monument to the horrible Lennon in Central Park is real work.

Why don't schools adopt that ethic? What's standing in the way?

It's a managerial mania, a managerial pathology that shows no signs of having reached a conclusion. For reasons that are both fair and foul -- but mostly for fair reasons -- we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.

In a society that's going to be scientifically managed, what are the things that interfere with the smooth administration of that form of management? Well, for one thing, it's the managers' subordinates saying, "I don't think we should do it that way." A managed life extends your childhood from birth to death. You're never really responsible for your decisions, and you can never really take credit for your successes either.

Let's shift to the world of business and work for a moment. Grades and gold stars in school prepare people for pay raises and promotions on the job, don't they?

They're BS. I'm against those things. But don't make me look like one of those romantic people who are against them because I don't want to see kids compete with one another. Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.

So what are some lessons for someone who is running a business?

Look at Silicon Valley. Everybody there is working much harder than you could legally require them to work. Why? Because they are working for themselves. It's exciting; the work itself is exciting. To teach people that we work to get money to buy stuff is insane. We work because work is thrilling.