FOLLOWING BADGER

Lifelong Education Reconsidered Part 1

Fredric Lehrman

Hello, Class.

Today, you are in "Kindergarten."

What do you remember about that?

There are as many answers to that question as there are children in your classroom.

You may be sitting on the floor in a circle, listening to the "Teacher" speaking to you, perhaps saying something about how happy she or he is to see you, and then asking you to raise your hand and "tell us your name, and how you feel about what you will discover in getting to know each other and meeting new friends." Or the teacher might say, "Tell us how you came here today, what you would like to begin learning first." Or, "What is your favorite thing in life... and what makes you happy?"

Each of these questions may cause you to feel happy or shy, but if you have a "good" teacher you will probably feel safer. If you have a teacher who starts by telling you their name, and then tells you something they like to do.

If "school" starts this way, you will feel safer and perhaps eager to begin to open up and start to enjoy the process of getting to know each other.

How long has it been since you remembered such things? Your first year in "Preschool" may be mostly lost in memory for many reasons... and, your subsequent experience may have been shaped by shyness, confusion, and "not knowing" what to say.

Do you still struggle with some of those feelings?

I am writing these things because I was very shy about many things all the way through to my Sixth Year in an experimental school in midtown New York City. I was the youngest and smallest student in my large class of "high IQ", one of four classes of about 25 students each who were being "tested" to prove they were "smart."

Every week we were given a new test on Friday, just to see how our classes were holding up to the challenge. I was nowhere near the smart end of the ladder. But I did get very good at "guessing."

By the time our sixth year was completed, we all had to transfer to new schools, so my father put me into McBurney, an all-boys 7th grade school on the West side of Central Park. My strongest memories are: Playing Ping Pong; Soccer practice, an English teacher named Mr. Finser who surprised us one morning by coming to school with a strange black case that distracted us for 30 minutes while we took another test about a book assignment, after which he collected the test the papers, opened the case, and pulled out a gleaming brass trumpet that he played brilliantly until the bell rang.

That was the high point of the first half of seventh grade. The second semester had me failing English for about two months, for which I had to stay after school to "make up" on my grammar under the watchful eyes of the school principal named Dr. Bam who had been imported from South Africa.

He taught me how to analyze and "diagram" paragraphs using serious books of literary merit. Somehow, I caught on to this quickly, and finished the year with an A- in this arcane skill (and I was very thankful to Dr. Bam). I never heard about the technique again, because I got my father to "get me out of that school!"

My struggles in 8th through 12th grades at Rudolph Steiner High School... (the first of its kind in North America) ...had a different dynamic. My class had about 18 students, some of which changed in the following five years.

We were the third class to reach the Senior year, and we finally vanquished all the larger high school Soccer teams that had crushed us as we struggled against them on the way up (they were always older and larger). As Seniors, we knew all the tricks! Most of us managed to get into acceptable colleges. I wanted to stay in New York to continue my musical studies on the classical guitar, which was the first of many careers. That's another story, But, once again, I survived the academic challenges along the way up, leading a double life as I floated on into graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Ethnomusicology for two years before going full time into concert playing. What a relief!

I know that this story may seem strange, but it allowed me to clearly see that academic education was not my style. However, it probably saved my life, as I might otherwise possibly have been a dead soldier in Korea or Viet Nam.

The purpose of my telling you all of this is to allow you to review your education, whether good or bad, and to ask yourself, was it worth it? "Standard Education" evolved in the 19th Century in Europe and America. Before that, education was predominantly technical or spiritual, depending on the "trade" or vocation the individual had in their career speculations. Medical and technical schools were created for the students who were interested in those skills, whether chemistry, law, politics, engineering, etc. (in other words, mental or physical crafts) that appealed to a select student demand.

The modern universities of the present century are no longer required as they were in the 20th Century on the insistence of a diploma or a merit badge or a uniform. Those avocations are dependent on the "Spirit" of the individual student, in other words, a life choice. Those schools are still active, but the technology of education has broadened through the Internet.

Perhaps we will see the older "great" universities concentrating their efforts on research rather than "graduation" before the year 2050 has come and gone.

Think about this, and it will free you of the obligation to struggle for years to obtain a piece of parchment when you can yourself embody the heart, mind, and communication skills that the entire planet is longing for.