So, today’s walkie-talkie is happening a little later than usual. Tom is getting an extensive tattoo on her left arm, so I’m home alone. I had a terrible night. I don’t really want to talk about why, and the day hasn’t gotten much better. But I am doing a walkie-talkie because I absolutely need to take my mind off things that I cannot possibly change.
Today’s quote that was randomly selected from my index cards was from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” It was suggested by authors of another book, and I really like the introduction, but once I got into the first couple chapters, I found myself not really agreeing with a lot of things that he said, especially things that had to do with religion. But there are several quotes I was able to pull from what I did read before I put the book down indefinitely. Today, I wanted to talk about what he calls the “great books conviction.”
He says, “That conviction was that nature is the only thing that counts in education, that the human desire to know is permanent, that all it really needs is the proper nourishment, and that education is merely putting the feast on the table.”
Me, I initially went to college to be a history teacher. But because of very limited offerings in that department at the small private college in New Hampshire I went to, I ended up transitioning over to English. There I discovered the field of forensic reading. Now the problem with studying in that field is that it’s tied closely to criminal justice. Yes, I am a big fan of public safety. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the judicial system. So, because the forensic reading department is closer to the judicial system than law enforcement, I didn’t want to do that, either. I decided on studying to be an English teacher.
But the problem is, I left that school in New Hampshire. due to a myriad of issues. So, the next two years of school I felt like I was playing catch-up because many of my class credits didn’t transfer from the old school to a local college in Massachusetts. I ended up having to retake a whole bunch of prerequisites. One of them was Writing 102, which is a pretty standard course. The issue is that I passed it previously in New Hampshire, obviously with flying colors because I am a writer, first and foremost. For whatever reason, they wouldn’t accept that from my previous school.
Well, I just could not seem to pass it in my new school. The first time I just dropped it. They decided to make it an online-only course that semester for whatever reason. Then, the teacher was an idiot, and didn’t ever upload things properly or mark things properly. So, I put it off until my fourth year of college, which would have been my senior year.
Unfortunately, once I got there, I ended up with this professor who was this old hag, pardon my choice of words. She didn’t understand why a fourth-year student was in a freshman class, and she didn’t like it. I was going to class with these 18- and 19-year-olds, and I’m pushing 22 at this point in school. The first couple essays I wrote, she magically lost them. Then I got zeros on them because she claimed she didn’t get them. I realized she just didn’t like me because I was an incredible writer compared to anyone she’d ever seen. Therefore, she probably thought I was plagiarizing. In fact, I had been accused of plagiarism at the New Hampshire school, but anyone who knows me knows I would never plagiarize. I always cite my sources. The accusations were dismissed, but they still pissed me off in a major way.
One day, about halfway through my second semester of my fourth year of school, I show up for class after my part-time job, and the teacher sits us down and says we’re going to learn the parts of speech. I raise my hand and say this is stuff I learned in third or fourth grade. She tells me to quiet down and listen. I get up and tell her I’m not dealing with this; it’s elementary school stuff. She tells me to sit down and learn to write properly. I give her both barrels with my middle fingers and quite emphatically tell her to GFY. I walk out, and after that defiant display, several students follow me in solidarity. A few days later, I was put on academic suspension. She clearly reported me. The bitch just hated me and hated teaching in general at that point. How she was still a professor in such a key prerequisite course I have no idea. But that essentially ended my college career. I never returned to campus after that.
And before you think, well, that was an impulsive thing to do, I already knew that position at my work was opening up. Had I the chance to live that moment over again, I would do it EXACTLY the same! No one is going to tell me that I don’t know how to write and discredit me out of hand.
Anyway, you might think, what does any of this have to do with that quote? Long before this, long before even college, I realized, thanks to Ben Franklin, that you do not need to go to college to have a strong education. You just need to find the right books that teach you the right things about how the world works. Reading gives you an unparalleled opportunity to understand different perspectives on how people think, how people do things, how things have been done, how ideas have evolved over time.
I always was an avid reader. Problem is, I was very disorganized and I spent so much of my time playing video games, following sports, and doing foolish things that young people do, especially playing trading card games. I was spending way too much money on Yu-Gi-Oh, for example. I would read, but rather sporadically, and I never took good notes when I did. I tended to speed read through a book and not retain very much. My comprehension, and especially my retention, was just awful. I just stopped reading for a few years, outside of blogs and news articles.
I think my sudden disinterest in reading was that the whole idea of education had turned me off. By the time I was put on suspension, I’d planned to quit entirely. When I was offered a full-time position at my current work, it was easy to do so. Because I was on academic suspension, my student loans became due. Naturally, I had to start paying for them anyway. I thought, I’d rather work anyway. It would easily both cover my student loans and allow me to save up for the future.
So, what this quote reminds me of is that I always had a desire to learn. But school took so much money that I didn’t even have, put me in massive amounts of debt, mortgaging my future, and I never got a degree out of it. I failed several classes in the last couple of years because I just wasn’t interested and never showed up. I was bored. I had no interest in half the things that we were being taught because it was just not interesting to me.
In hindsight, I probably should’ve just quit after my second year and instead gone on like the Harvard website and looked at their curriculum. Even at this point, around 2007, they were putting curriculum for free online, along with the reading lists and assignments. So, I really should have just quit school. But the problem is I would have been on the street because my parents only let me come home to go to school locally if I kept going to school. And the only reason they didn’t kick me out after I got suspended from the college in Massachusetts was because I’d already secured a full-time job.
Fortunately, that full-time job ended up being more of an education than my four fruitless years of college. I was there part-time for two years, and I worked there for the better part of the next four years. So, I basically got a degree by working, but I got paid for it. So that’s kind of neat, all that practical work experience in a field I was good at, that being SEO, blogging, and digital marketing. I learned some sales and accounting skills as I went along, too.
So yeah, I agree with people that say practical experience is more important than book learning. Again, humans have an innate desire to know things. We’re just curious creatures. It’s just how we are. But the problem is that education does not teach us how to educate ourselves because then they would make their jobs unnecessary.
I think of what my mom used to say to me, that a parent’s job is to make their job unnecessary. That alone is an interesting quote that I need to go into more detail in future. But I think that the whole point of an educator is to make their job unnecessary, to give students the tools and skills to succeed in a given field. If you’re going to invest tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in school, you should be going only to learn super-specialized knowledge that you can’t necessarily glean from some random book.
Sure, I wanted to get a ”proper” education, but the problem is, I knew that not only would I not make enough money to make it, if I had, let’s just say for the sake of argument, I had gotten my degree, gotten my master’s in education, and started teaching. I still would have been stuck living at home with my parents. There’s no way I would have made nearly enough to pay my college loans off while also living on my own. Basically, had I kept going with university education, my entire paycheck would have been going to my student loans and I’d still be living with my parents today. Yeah, I didn’t want to throw my life away like that. Actually, I probably would have ended up becoming RIP. But let’s not get too morbid here.
So yeah, human nature is that we are curious. But the idea that education merely puts the feast on the table, if you’re going to school and you’re not getting anything out of it, then it’s just not worth it. However, I assure you that it’s not your fault. It’s the information being presented in a way that’s just not useful or interesting and critical thinking and study skills not being paramount in today’s education at the ground level.
I have been corresponding with somebody, a friend of Tom’s, who is taking courses in elementary education. I encouraged her to continue her studies because clearly, we need better educators in the US. It’s not teachers that are the problem; it’s the educators, the people who hire the teachers and force them to follow these ridiculous federal rules. That’s why I want the Department of Education to go away because it’s not productive to have all these restrictive, proscriptive regulations; states and local governments should be able to handle the educational needs of their constituents. We need teachers that instill not just a love of reading in kids, but a love of active, intentional reading, having a conversation with the ideas in the book.
A long time ago, a good friend of mine said that a good book is like having a very long monologue with one person. I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but that was pretty much the idea. By taking notes and writing essays about it, you’re essentially in conversation with the author, however indirectly. If you’re not in conversation with ideas, you’re just reading the words on the page, absorbing information that gets filed away in some remote corner of your brain where it’s just sitting there and not doing anything to improve your life.
That’s why I’ve instilled in me the idea that you need to read at least a half hour a day. Some days I have a hard time, and I can’t focus because I’m autistic. Like today, I didn’t sleep well. I read literally two pages of a book because I just couldn’t focus. And that’s okay. You must give yourself some grace. But there’s great news: to be book-learned and well read, you only need to read for 30 minutes a day. The trick is, you need to take notes in that half an hour. You need to write down at least one or two things that interest you. If you didn’t find anything interesting, ask if this book is doing anything for you. Not finding that the book is speaking to you? Put it down, give it away, send it to Goodwill or whatever, and find another book. There are so many reading lists, so many great suggestions. You can always go online and look at Apple Books, Google Books, and Gutenberg.org for all kinds of free classics. I will warn you that on Gutenberg.org, a lot of the English translations of non-English works aren’t very good. If you prefer paper books, as I do, you can always go to Abe Books, which is great for used copies of good books. They are often ex-library books, which means I’m keeping them from being recycled, or worse yet, being thrown in landfills where they do no one any good.
Yes, at the end of the day, practical real-life experience is better, is greater than book learning. But you need at least some book learning because books contain ideas that we can absorb without having to experience things ourselves. Having the benefit of even some fraction of someone else’s life experience is extremely valuable. While our own life experience is important, using books to gain some insights we may not otherwise have for just half an hour a day is enough to put you ahead of most other people in the reading and self-education department. That half hour a day provides the necessary mental and intellectual nourishment to make you think.
When I read, every day that I write, something from my reading works its way into my writing. I have written in my journal today, and anytime that I do that, I have been productive. Sorry, this was a major ramble, very unfocused, and it was Major Pain to edit. Take care, everybody, and see you soon.
~ The “Phoenix”
Photo courtesy of Gustavo Belemmi, “Antique toy walkie-talkie,” under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 International License
