Self-Directed Life

There are many more things that are possible in nature than you will find written down in books. However, you will only discover this if you are ready to fail and you are ready to learn.

…It was a comfortable, almost luxurious existence. And yet all was not well. After the first burst of energy, the moving in of the machines, the digging of runners and rooms - after that was done, a feeling of discontent settled upon us like some creeping disease. We were reluctant to admit it at first. We tried to ignore the feeling or to fight it off by building more things — bigger rooms, fancier furniture, carpeted hallways, things we did not really need. I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town — so they bought vacuum cleaners, too. The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place. The story was part of a book of essays, and the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called ‘The Rat Race’ — which, I learned, means a race where, no mater how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.

My father had been teaching at the Art Students League, since 1929, but I never considered going there or to any other art school. My parents had always encouraged me to develop my own style of art. They both had undergone conventional art school training, but when they became involved in the modern art movement, they found they had to unlearn everything they had been taught. They had deliberately left me unschooled in art, wanting to see what would happen if I were left alone to develop in my own way. Of course I learned a great deal from growing up among artists, but none of it was formal art instruction. When you are young you learn from everything around you, and I learned from the art of the past and the present. The danger in being ‘self-taught’ is that in a sense you have to ‘reinvent the wheel.’ In art school I could have learned about techniques and materials, but much that makes up art instruction — composition, use of color, design, and form — came naturally to me. I know now that in the art courses I might have taken, there would never have been a blueprint for my own special ‘wheel’ — I would still have had to invent it.

My early interest in plants and the natural world was very apparent to my parents, and they nurtured it gently by simply allowing me to do what I loved doing. There was no song and dance made about it, just the act of creating a space in which I could pursue my interest.

If you’re an intelligent human being and you don’t have meaningful work, then you’d better find it because your death, in those spooky terms, is stalking you every day.

I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures… I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.

I was the sort of high school student who skipped school to hang out at the public library. I’ve only ever learned things through experience, reading real books or talking to old people.

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not primarily an industry and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘accessing’ what we now call ‘information’ — which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means first things first.

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on — well, what if you don’t like those books? I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

The conventional wisdom says that the specifics of what you learn are much less important than the fact that you’re learning the fundamentals, and you’re learning to learn — things you’ll need to maintain your skills and knowledge in a quickly changing world. The problem is, you virtually never hear a student say that. It’s always the parents or someone speaking on behalf of the educational system. When was the last time you honestly heard (and believed) an actual current college student claim that the true benefit of their formal college education is in learning to be a lifelong learner? That’s just bullsh*t. With very few exceptions, college in the US is more about drinking than it is about deep learning. Others claim that the benefit of a college degree is really more about socialization and independence. I’ve heard reasonably smart adults say, with all sincerity, that spending $80,000 so little Suzy could learn to live on her own was worth it. I think there are a thousand different, and often better, ways to achieve that. Suzy could join the Peace Corps, for example, or go on one of those ‘learning vacations’ where you do an archealogical dig. Hell, just a three-month long trip through Europe with a couple friends and a rail pass (or, as a friend of mine did, a bike trip across Turkey) is certainly going to do more for socialization and independence than a traditional college environment, and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Everything I hear about is whether a kid — male or female — should pursue this field or that field, what the long-term career prospects are, etc. I almost never hear much discussion about whether it matters if they have a passion for. It’s true that sometimes college is the best way for them to discover their passion, but I’ve seen way too many young people traumatized by the thought of telling their parents that after three years of pre-med, they’re switching to something like… ornamental horticulture (a big area of study at my alma mater, Cal Poly SLO). …Vegetarian cooking is [my daughter’s] passion. She believes in it, she loves it, she takes great pleasure in it. She evangelizes it to others. What horrifies me is that even though I knew she felt this way, it never occurred to me that this was something she might consider instead of college. But she got me with this one: ‘Mom, your degree was exercise physiology. You spent your first five years out of college as a glorified aerobic instructor. Then you taught yourself programming, took a few night classes at UCLA, and made a huge career switch into computers, and found you loved it. You have your own computer book series. Yet you told me you had just a single computer class in college, and you hated it. So… tell me again why college was so great for you?’ And then the kicker: ‘I have no idea if I’ll ever open a restaurant or develop this into a professional career, but whatever investment I make in this will serve me and make me happy for the rest of my life. I’ll be using what I learn here in my personal life, almost every day, regardless of my career. How many people can say that about 90% of what they learned in college?’ The part I still have to get over is that feeling of a missed opportunity. Of unfulfilled potential (too many Microsoft ads?). This was a straight-A kid. One far brighter at 12 than I’ll ever be. One of those about whom people say, ‘She could succeed at anything she wants.’ yet what we all secretly meant was, ‘She could succeed at anything we think she should want.’ Lucky for her, she learned at a much earlier age that passion matters. That money is far less important than joy (and that money doesn’t buy joy). And that whatever decision she makes now, does not determine the rest of her life. She understands that the chances of anyone having a single career for life — or even a decade — are asymptotically approaching zero. And that nothing — not finances (or lack of) or gender or age — will stand in her way if she decides to learn something. And if what she wants to learn at some point in the future is best studied in a formal higher education environment, there’s nothing to stop her from going to college then.