I don’t much like excuses. Explanations I can deal with. Excuses pretty much turn me off. I bring this up because lately it seems like excuses are coming out of the woodwork. There’s two excuses in particular that move right to the top of my “peeve list”. The first one is, “I just don’t have the time”. What? How can you not have the time? Unless you’re dead you have exactly the same amount of time everyone else in the world has. You have 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year. If you can’t bring me some evidence that you were born with a congenital time deficiency which causes you to only have 50 minutes in an hour, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you what you are. A liar. Yeah, it’s a little “white lie”, but what you’re really saying is, “This just isn’t that important to me to spend time on it”. And that’s OK. We all have to make choices. There’s a ton of things I choose not to spend time on. So admit it. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. It’s insulting. I know better.
The second excuse I’ve heard goes something along the lines of “Well I just don’t have the education”. That may be true. I won’t call you a liar on this one. But where my peeve comes in is that an education is available. All you have to do is reach out and take it. Now I’m not talking about going back to school. Sure, that’s great if you can, and if you have the time and resources you should definitely do it. What I’m talking about is the same thing that Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he wrote to his college-age nephew, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., “…you can proceed by yourself in a regular series of historical reading. It would be a waste of time to attend a professor of this. It is to be acquired from books…”
Yep, books. Reading. You don’t have to be a graduate from high school, or college to do it. Louis L’Amour, the prolific writer (over 100 novels), and historian, was entirely self-educated. He left high school during the Depression to provide some income for his family, and never went back to school. Yet he became recognized as one of the most educated men of our time, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor reserved for those who make extraordinary contributions to our nation. How did he do it? Simple. He read. And thought about what he had read. (Read his story for yourself. You’ll find it in his book The Education of a Wandering Man.)
He’s not the only one. ABC News reporter and anchorman, Peter Jennings did the same thing. Or how about Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s restaurants? OK, Bill Gates did graduate from high school, but not from college. I think you get my point. So…
READ. Several years ago this simple word was used on posters and billboards by a literacy activist group to encourage people to…READ. I think this advice may now be more important than ever. Even though the “futurists” among us are convinced that reading will be replaced by television, DVDs, iPODs, and technologies we haven’t heard of yet, I still believe that reading, and more importantly, the ability to read, will remain a significant factor between those who achieve success in this world, and those who don’t.
READ. So why are so many people so reluctant to do it? In times past, what we would call “classical” schoolmasters divided learning into three stages called “the trivium”. The first stage was called the “grammar” stage. (Hence our grammar or elementary schools). This stage focused on memorization. The idea was to gather information---C A T spells Cat, or 2 X 4 = 8. The goal being to acquire a certain amount of knowledge. The second stage was called the “logic” stage. It required that the student start thinking at this point. Evaluate. Is this information correct or not correct? Is this a cause or an effect? The final stage was called the“rhetoric” stage. Remember the first time you were asked to write an essay? This is rhetoric; learning to construct your own opinions based on the facts you have accumulated. The classical educators knew that this pattern—learn facts, analyze those facts, and develop opinions about those facts—is the basis for life-long learning.
Unfortunately, educators started to skip the first two steps and started asking first graders how they feel about what they’re learning before they’ve even had a chance to learn it yet. This “short cut” is now ingrained for many. They go right to the opinion making, before they’ve even learned the facts. (Don’t believe me? Just listen to talk radio for about 5 minutes, or review those Facebook posts from your friends.) As Susan Wise Bauer points out in her book, The Well-Educated Mind, “Like badly taught six-year-olds, we are too quick to go straight to opinion making without the intermediate steps of understanding and evaluation.” And a formal education does not make you immune. I’ve known Harvard grads to jump right to stage three without ever pausing to gather a fact, while the old Oklahoma farmers I grew up with wouldn’t make a move without “studyin’ up” on a subject first.
So what’s the hardest thing about reading? Making the time. As Susan Wise Bauer notes: “The first task of self-education is not the reading of Plato, but the finding of twenty minutes in which you can devote yourself to thought, rather than to activity.” Taking care of the kids, getting ready for work, fixing supper, paying bills, checking email, answering the cell phone, all these things push at us. And we bosses don’t help. “You don’t have anything to do, well come see me, I’ll give you something to do.” And I’m willing to bet you’ve never heard, “Why don’t you just go back to your desk and spend the rest of the afternoon reading and thinking.” We both know that ain’t gonna happen, but I sometimes wonder what great things we might accomplish if it did.
And no, I don’t think you only have to read “The Great Books”—you know, Plato, Shakespeare, Homer. You can learn a lot from reading well-written novels. Nora Roberts’ books can take you traveling around the world; Louis L’Amour will take you back to the frontier and steep you in the values of that era. Tom Clancy will take you into the depths of military technology and current politics. Reading can be fun. If you haven’t been reading for a while this is how you should start. The brain is an organ and it has to be exercised to stay in shape. Just as you wouldn’t think about running a marathon without training for it, neither should you just jump into a schedule that calls for two hours a day of difficult study. You won’t stick with it. So start easy, and build up to it.
Having said that, if it’s a broader education you want, at some point you will have to take the plunge and begin to delve deeper. History, biography, philosophy, economics, politics, theology. And even here, you don’t have to devour everything you run across. As the sixteenth century philosopher, Francis Bacon, has pointed out: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Find a menu that appeals to you, and systematically, and methodically, go through it.
In the meantime, it doesn’t matter where you are in your life right now. If you want an education it’s there for the taking. And you can do it in thirty minutes a day. Get up thirty minutes earlier. Watch thirty less minutes TV. Surely there’s thirty minutes that aren’t absolutely “must see”. (Personally I can give up the thirty minutes for “Two Broke Girls”, just don’t ask me to give up “Big Bang Theory”). Especially if you haven’t read for a while, thirty minutes is plenty to start. Much longer than that and you likely won’t stick with it. As your brain expands you may find your time spent reading expands too. That’s fine. Let it happen naturally.
Don’t get caught up in the excuses. You do have the time. It’s your choice how to use it. You can get an education if you really want one. It’s not up to a school. It’s up to you.
