My academic life has specialized in general education: helping find the tools to learn anything. There is so much beauty, great art, wonderful movies, profound books, and stirring teachers that I am thankful for eternity. Just opera, learning to appreciate and love opera, will take me centuries!
When I was a little boy in West Virginia, the stars were easy to see. Clendenin, West Virginia, does not do light pollution. I knew just enough to think of the burning lights in heaven as poetic marvels, romantic, and objects of scientific study. There was longing to be on the bridge of the Enterprise boldly going and to listen to these great gods declare the glory of God. Nothing was forbidden and all seemed whole. I knew that in some areas (mathematics) my learning would be limited by ability, but that was too bad. I would have been happy to learn more.
I was talking to a group of college students recently and one asked:
What got you interested in this type of thinking and exploration?
This gave me pause, since they had just finished reading my book When Athens Met Jerusalem. What is “this type” of thinking and exploration? In talking to these very bright young adults, I learned. Evidently, loving the cosmos and poetry, science fiction and fantasy, history and mathematics is not 2017 normal even though they are blessed to be in a program where it is the aspiration. Their program assumes that people should simply wallow in thinking, art, and beauty while something in their backgrounds suggests this is . . . odd. Some find “old” ideas foreign and so excluded, others loved the old at the expense of the new. A few sneered at science in favor of literature, but most thought of science as practically important, but poetry mere decoration.
I realized that these assumptions (study this and never that was common, but it still seems odd to me. Why would anyone ever wish to turn from any good, true, or beautiful idea? Until one is sure that an idea is not (at least in part) good, true, or beautiful, who would reject that idea?
On the surface, nobody would. Curiosity may have killed cats, but humankind has flourished, because we like to think and nothing is foreign to us. Officially, we all thirst for knowledge, all the different ways of knowing, but a killing kind of practicality, where a person specializes to fit into the machine of money making or power, has grown up. Dickens fought it in Hard Times and officially the liberal arts curriculum of our high schools and most of our colleges is on the side of general education. We might end up majoring in something specific, as is proper, but we are encouraged in dabbling in all the big fields of knowledge. A great good of multiculturalism is in expanding the things we are eager to learn. We already knew we could not master the many cultures (living and dead) that formed our home language, but now we are tempted by even more knowing. This is entirely good.
Yet I have noticed that if given the choice of hundreds of programs, I can freeze and end up watching programs I have already seen, because I know they are good. The great menu might frighten me or worse, seem a waste. I only have so much time for television and if I choose a bad show, then my free time is gone. Isn’t it best to stick with the safe?
God forbid!
I came to this “way” of learning by being raised by serious Christian parents who wanted to know the truth. My Mom would consider anything and would spend days thinking through issues with us. More important, she might decide to bring home a notebook and work with us (long before the Internet) on finding out all we could on some topic (say Japan) that did not immediately occur to us in our particular lives. Mom was interested in everything and it never occurred to me that any person was here to drudge away life earning money or playing societies games. Why?
We are souls created in God’s image. Because of the broken world, many times we would have to do our duty in unpleasant ways, but that was so we could learn, make music, talk, and play. As a result, through no virtue of my own (and despite my real vices), it never occurred to me that I should narrow down. Because Dad and Mom thought some ideas were wrong, they did not censor ideas. After all, perhaps their ideas were wrong. The library was ours to explore and we did. When we hit bad ideas (racism, scientism are two examples), then we would talk until we came to what we thought (for the moment) was the bottom of it. We had gotten as far as we could go.
We might not “get” particular music or even listen to it, but I never recall being taught that any music is beyond the pale. It might have bad to it, but meant you had to listen to learn. Besides, music, church, art, and culture were complex. There was good to it all. I remember hearing a pastor I knew was “off,” but learning some wisdom from him. Dad was plain: God’s gifts were God’s gifts. Learn. Listen. Do not excuse the “off” (if off it was), but do not ignore the good. Nothing was so good (like our church) that it did not have some bad or so bad (as some of the broken people who came to our house were) that they had nothing valuable to teach us. They found teachers for me that showed me far more possibilities than I could imagine. We heard wisdom from the Argentine, Palestine, Wales, India. We learned from men, old when I was young, that knew songs that were old when they were young. They would sing and I would learn while also going to a school where Dad had hired Eastman School of Music grads to teach us.
Nothing was forbidden, even if not everything was beneficial.
If I have ever helped anyone else see this way of living, it was no credit to me. It never occurred to me there was anything else. We are here to be ourselves as God made us and not cogs or objects for any desire or system. We are here to be human. We specialize when we must, or because we should, but given eternity,,all learning, all good ideas, all beauty, and all joy in learning would be ours. I still wish to journey to the stars, to learn what makes the cosmos work, but also to know what a star is. I want to know the love that moves the heavens and the stars.
————————-
*The remarkable chair of the Honors Program had some questions for me based on my book When Athens Met Jerusalem. If I get to them all, there are twenty-two questions. Here is: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In