A man is marked as educated
not by his complicated answers
but by his clear, simple questions. Teachers, being generally knowledgeable, serve as rich sources of useful information. To secure it, however, you must be prepared always to ask questions without the slightest hesitation. In my experience, the quality and excitement of the answer are in direct proportion to the thoughtfulness, simplicity, and daring of the question... A few teachers, if you are lucky, will also be for you examples of the inquiring mind at work....But the ordinary teacher can be expected to school you in a subject; if you wish to be truly educated, you must depend on yourself. If you complain that school is uninteresting or irrelevant, or that it teaches conformity and merely trains you to fill a place in society, it is because you let it do so... It is an unhappy truth that anyone who depends solely on others for the test of his achievements will end life feeling he has accomplished nothing: there are so many to please and someone is always dissatisfied. So set your own sights and, provided you give your best effort, you can feel free to demand that your teachers teach you what you want to know... No matter how skilled your teachers, they will never substitute for sitting down with a book and digging in. As a strategy for reading intelligently, I recommend that you always begin with a question, if no more than to ask what you expect to learn from the book and what is the perspective from which the author presents his ideas. For myself, I always write profusely in the margins. This saves me much exclaiming and swearing aloud (which librarians seem not to care for, no matter the enthusiasm for learning it may display). It also leaves me in the end with not one book, but two. By this means you will discover that every book starts with an idea, an implied question, the quest for a personal answer... If you come to books in this manner, you will end up an educated man, no matter how meager your classroom opportunities or how poor the official reports. On the other hand, if your intelligence and industry lead you to the heights of academic achievement, you will still retain an essential humility and tolerance for the views of others. If you respect the diversity of possible answers, you will perceive how another, in good faith, can find his way to a conflicting result without being thought a dullard or a nincompoop. Then you can understand that he simply began with a different question than yours, viewed his subject from a different perspective, and consequently sees, in truth, something new. At best, you can appreciate that learning is not a lonely or a competitive enterprise, but an essentially cooperative one. Such cooperation will encourage creative conflict, preserve the dialectic of question and answer, and teach you that Truth is better illuminated by shedding more light on the subject than can come from your own little candle. From FATHER TO SON: THOUGHTS TO LIVE BY,
by GORDON CLARK SCHLOMING (1944-1994)
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