How to survive education

 
       You have to really enjoy a man like Mark Twain. Most of us grew up reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and then a bit later, we started to enjoy all of his humorous quips that history noted and has preserved. Having spent the majority of my adult life in higher education, I was intrigued by his somewhat, perhaps, tongue in cheek remark,” I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The uninformed might say,  “Well, after all he was only a riverboat pilot.” Granted, but William Faulkner considered him “the father of American literature” and few would disagree that Twain is the greatest humorist this country has ever produced. It appears that his decision to keep school from interfering with his education was validated by the impact of his creative years.
       But let’s considered the quote itself. His position is that schooling and education are not necessarily the same. In fact, Twain is suggesting that time at school may well interfere with genuine education. He makes an important point. The basic task of education is to train people how to think. Time spent mulling over the unimportant could have been better spent teaching the basics of the process of learning. I have taught at every level from the first grade to graduate school and given considerable thought to the learning process. The kind of learning that pays off in the long run is how to take disparate bits of information and consider how they might relate in a way that arrives at a productive conclusion. One might call the process ”intellectual entrepreneurism.” The creative mechanic may well come up with a better way to make a brake that will stop the car more effectively. A creative thinker may come up with a new relationship between certain ideas that will help to explain why a certain process has a more positive result than its alternative. The learning process in both areas is essentially the same. The school in which children are taught how to think, not simply what to think, will prepare them for a significantly better approach to the problems of life that lie ahead.
       I remember that period of time in my life when I learned the excitement of learning. Unfortunately, for me it was after college, not in grade school where it should have been. My challenge would be for the entire educational system to take Mark Twain’s clever remark more seriously than he probably intended. It’s the old ”box” analogy. We admire those who think outside that box, but have probably never been told how, or encouraged, to go there ourselves.