The other day, just as the A to Z challenge was ending, I happened to browse and read (as you do) a bit of Susan Wise Bauer‘s The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.
These paragraphs, on pages 16 – 17 made me stop:
“Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance,” Isaac Watts advised his readers, in his self-education treatise Improvement of the Mind (originally published in 1741). “Impress your mind with a deep and painful sense of the low and imperfect degrees of your present knowledge.” This cheerful admonition was intended as a reassurance, not a condemnation: A well-trained mind is the result of application, not inborn genius. Deep thinkers, Watts assures us, are not those born with “bright genius, a ready wit, and good parts” (a relief for most of us). No matter how ignorant and “low” a mind might be, “studious thought . . . the exercise of your own reason and judgment upon all you read . . . gives good sense . . . and affords your understanding the truest improvement.”
… Sustained, serious reading is at the center of the self-education project. Observation, reading, conversation, and attendance at lectures are all educational pursuits, as Isaac Watts goes on to tell us. But he concludes that reading is the most important method of self-improvement. Observation limits our learning to our immediate surroundings; conversation and attendance at lectures are valuable, but expose us only to the views of a few nearby persons. Reading alone allows us to reach out beyond the restrictions of time and space, to take part in what Mortimer Adler has called the “Great Conversation” of ideas that began in ancient times and has continued unbroken to the present. Reading makes us part of this Great Conversation, no matter where and when we pursue it.
But sustained and serious reading has always been a difficult project— even before the advent of television. Much has been written about our present move away from texts, toward an image-based, visual culture: Schools no longer teach reading and writing properly. Television, movies and now the Web have decreased the importance of the written word. We are moving into a postliterate age. Print culture is doomed. Alas.
I dislike these sorts of apocalyptic reflections. Television may be pernicious, but reading is no harder (or easier) than it has ever been.
Reading this coincided with the fact that I have been thinking that I need/want something challenging to do. I’ve been idly considering whether I want another degree – but then I already have a Masters, isn’t that enough? I don’t actually need it for my job (I don’t want to become an academic.) What I actually want: I want to write more. I want to study. I want to learn. I want to improve myself. Are these goals necessarily going to be achievable via formal university study?
Bauer argues that we can use the skills developed in Western classical education both to learn and to “become enlightened”.
But gathering data and reading—understanding ideas and how people act when they try to five by those ideas—are not the same occupation. When you gather data from a newspaper or book, you use the same mechanical skill as when you engage in serious reading. Your eyes move; the words convey meaning to your mind. Yet your mind itself functions in a different way. When you gather data, you become informed. When you read, you develop wisdom—or, in Mortimer Adler’s words, “become enlightened.” “To be informed,” Adler writes in How to Read a Book, “is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.” To be informed is to collect facts; to be enlightened is to understand an idea (justice, or charity, or human freedom) and use it to make sense of the facts you’ve gathered. (p.24)
According to Bauer:
In the classical school, learning is a three-part process. First, taste: Gain basic knowledge of your subject. Second, swallow: Take the knowledge into your own understanding by evaluating it. Is it valid? Is it true? Why? Third, digest: Fold the subject into your own understanding. Let it change the way you think—or reject it as unworthy. Taste, swallow, digest; find out the facts, evaluate them, form your own opinion. (p.18)
Classical education? Am I nuts? Shouldn’t I focus on something more contemporary, like making videos, or digital curation, or something along those lines?
Well, who’s to say I can’t do this as well as all the usual online stuff? And I like a challenge, right?
I already love reading, I just want to start to read things I have always put aside for later (when?) or considered too difficult. To date I’ve read sort of widely, but without any particular aim, and definitely mostly for enjoyment only. Which is not to say I shan’t enjoy the stuff I’m going to start reading. Bauer’s book guides you through five reading lists: fiction, autobiography, history and politics, drama, and poetry. I really want to work through the poetry list, so that’s what I shall do, even though she says it’s the most difficult and she recommends readers start with the fiction list. (The first work on the poetry list is the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. I’m not letting myself think about this too much. Or I’ll agree it’s madness and I’ll quit before I begin.)
As usual, it’s all about maintaining a routine and practising so that certain skills turn into habits. I’ll let you how it goes.
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Thank you,
Max Weismann
I’m feeling very inspired by this. Thank you. Love that you are doing the poetry.
TB