Science class

* * * Before we go further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .
--But we didn't have any of this, you . . .
--That's why you're having it now! Just once, if you could, if somebody in this class could stop fighting off the idea of trying to think. All right, it all comes back to this question of energy doesn't it, a concept that can't be understood without a grasp of the second law of, yes? Can't you hear me in the back there?
--This wasn't in the reading assignment and that . . .
--And that . . . he paused to align pencils on his desk all pointing in the same direction before he looked up to her far in the back bunched high and girlish by a princess waist, bangs shading the face pancaked into concert with her classmates in the shadowless vacancy of youth, --that is why I am telling it to you now.

William Gaddis, J R, at 20-21.