If the Labors of Hercules had an intellectual equivalent, it would be modern education. By the end of high school, we expect a student to know about 60,000 words; read To Kill a Mockingbird; learn the Pythagorean theorem; absorb a national history; and have peered through a microscope. Advanced students will put on Greek tragedies; rediscover the principles of calculus; memorize the Gettysburg Address; and measure the pull of gravity. In effect, students have twelve years to reconstruct the world’s profoundest thoughts – discoveries that history’s greatest thinkers took centuries to hit upon.
