January 12, 2003
The value of visiting teachers: "Why is the sky dark at night?"
I remember as a teenager having been deeply affected by journalist-adventurer Rose Wilder Lane's account of the Saracen markets of learning in her classic The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority.
Few modern readers are familar with the 700-year flowering of knowledge and culture in the "Saracen" lands of north Africa, during the era most school-goers are taught were the "Dark Ages" of Europe. The Dark Ages did indeed occur - though most of what's popularly taught about the subject is pure bunk - but no mention is ever made of the flowering of civilization in the lands south of Europe.
"The refugee scientists in Persia were popular now - respected, admired, listened to. No Authority suppressed them; no police kicked them around. They opened their schools; from Baghdad to Granada, their schools were crowded with students. In two centuries, they were great universities, the world's first universities......These universities had no organization whatsoever... A Saracen university had no program, no curriculum, no departments, no rules, no examinations; it gave no degrees nor diplomas. It was simply an institution of learning. Not of teaching, but of learning. A man, young or old, went to a university to learn what he wanted to know, just as an American goes to a grocery to get the food he wants.
Men who knew (or thought they knew) something, and wanted to teach it, opened a school to sell their knowledge. Sucess depended upon the demand for the knowledge they had. If they prospered, other teachers joined them..."
[pp89-90]
There are still a few people around who "get it" when it comes to thinking clearly about education and learning; Brian Micklethwait is one of them. In his post today, "Why is the Sky Dark at Night?", he recalls the experience of a presentation given by guest lecturer scientist Herman Bondi at his school in the '70's:
Bondi's talk didn't turn me into a scientist, but it did turn me into a lifelong science fan. It taught me that one of the great things about scientists is, not just their enthusiasm to discover obscure things, but their ability also to register amazement at the commonplace. Commonplace facts like the fact of gravity. We all know that "gravity" – or something like it – is a fact. But what is it? What, deep down, does "gravity" – this bizarre tendency of things to fall to the ground for no apparent reason – actually consist of? It takes an Isaac Newton to think like that, at a time when people as a whole tended not to and even to forbid themselves from such thoughts, and to carry on thinking like that until he had an answer that satisfied him.
Brian's commentary is particularly interesting not only in respect of the "love of learning" angle, but from what it says about the natural human tendancy to novelty-seeking - which I consider a defining survival trait of our species - and the psychological value of seeking learning dynamically, supplementing your regular studies with people you'd not otherwise consider:
As I say, the same bloke droning on yet again can sometimes work, but there's nothing quite like a visiting shooting star for lighting up the world. Failing that, if you are that same bloke droning on, at least try to talk sometimes about different stuff from your usual stuff.
Col. Jeff Cooper has said, "The goals of life are three: To understand, to accomplish, to appreciate." It's in this spirit, I think, that Brian says:
Bondi may have inspired some in his audience that day to become practising scientists, but not me. What he did for me was not to tell me anything about how to make money or be more "successful". What he did for me was make the times I already found myself living in more interesting and entertaining and profound and enjoyable
I share these feelings myself, which is a major reason I seek learning with known teachers - continuing with them over committed periods of time - and supplement with the different, the novel, the additionally challenging. All learning is done at the margins of our existing learning - that's how our brains are wired - but the committed dynamist extends that learning by making that extra stretch with the occasional new teacher. By such means do the important parts of ourselves remain young.
Posted by Russell Whitaker at January 12, 2003 12:56 PM | TrackBack