I decided to go to college. I anticipated that it would be a place where dissenting voices were recognized and applauded. This romantic vision appealed to me… I felt an urge to question more of society than just the music scene and people’s fashions… But I realize now, in retrospect, that the university was as replete with the pressure to conform as my high school was. Students were rewarded for thinking like the professor. Only rarely did the professors try to educe original ideas from the students. More often we were rewarded for regurgitating the same rhetoric on tests that they professed in the lectures, which were more like state-of-the-union addresses in any given discipline… I became acutely aware that the usual university experience for most students was one of indoctrination into the prescriptive thinking of a privileged society. It was a recipe for what was acceptable to society. And nowhere in that socialization process did they provide a troubleshooting guide to deal with alternative ways of thinking… Both of my higher-degree programs have taught me that the way to succeed in our society is to walk that fragile line between understanding the dogma that is inherent in the prevailing ideology and showing the people in power that you have your own ideas too but are not willing to infringe on their tolerance. Originality has a low tolerance threshold.

It depends on the kid. There are parts of it that are pretty intense. When I was 7 years old, I could not have seen this movie. It would’ve scared me. But my younger brother, who’s now 7, could’ve seen this a year ago. It depends on the kid.” — Max Records, who plays Max in Where The Wild Things Are, on whether the film is too scary for young children.