Creation and Education

Education is of course learning something. More importantly, it is becoming something. Although knowledge is needed for education, an educated person is not the same as a man who has knowledge. An educated person is one who is at work on his enlargement. If we learn things that become parts of us, if we make efforts to develop our own particular understanding of life and of the order of life's goods, it is education we are doing. A person is something that it takes time to make; there is on everyone an invisible sign, "Work in progress"; and the considered effort to get along with the work is education.

Thought of in this way, education is not as common as one might suppose. The institutions that we call "educational" are engaged only now and then in the development, in children and young people, of understanding of the order of life's goods. Schools and universities provide care of the young, offer recreation and pleasant associations, teach many useful skills from reading and writing to surgery and the preparation of legal briefs, and occasionally, desirably, indispensably educate.

So much of life goes just to keep things running, to police action, to bolstering the dikes against catastrophe. In our national life we have small freedom to decide how to spend the income of our immense national wealth. Most of it is firmly committed to paying for past wars and to trying to protect ourselves from or in future wars. In the schools we have got ourselves into a situation where we have only limited freedom to educate. You will see a schoolroom with fifty children and one teacher; the teacher uses most of her energies in keeping some kind of order. In a high school or college, also, much that goes on is merely custodial. Part of the budget goes to keeping the young people out of trouble and reasonably happy. If parents feel sure that this much is being accomplished, they are thankful and content.

If an occasional adult turns to the task of making himself grow in understanding of the order of life's goods by way of books and reasonable discussion, he meets a world and often a neighborhood that are unfavorable to his effort. Time and the will for education are in short supply. There are the pressures of immediate circumstance; there are work, entertainment, and the enjoyment of life in other ways. There are the innumerable problems of personal and public life. Many people today are passive or pessimistic; the tone of much public life is harsh and threatening; the danger of war by indiscriminate slaughter continues.

Nor is there much encouragement for education by adults, of themselves, in the examples and expectations that we encounter in our communities. What appears in most current print or broadcasting is for the most part irrelevant or ignoble. And one's neighbors are not likely to expect one to start work on one's own development through the pursuit of learning. Education, being a growth of the self, is in nature endless and hardly begins in the schools, but there is a widespread mistaken idea that all that sort of thing is over in school and college. Thoughtful people, who read a good many books, are today sometimes looked upon as a little queer, possibly as dangerous. The pursuit of learning by grown men and women is not very popular.

I state these difficulties so that we may take them into account in judging the worth of what I say here about what education is and how it goes on in men and women. No doubt I have overemphasized them. To the peasant of India wanting to learn just to read and write, America is vastly fortunate. Compared with other peoples, we are blessed with unusual material provision for such education as we may want to undertake. Where else is the working day so short? Where else have people such means to enjoy books, travel, and time to think?

In the very general sense of becoming something, everybody gets educated; everybody becomes something in the course of his life. The questions are, How good or bad a something? And, who decides what I become?

To meet the necessity of becoming something or other as one grows up and grows old, there are at least four distinguishable possibilities. The first way is no longer open to us; it was the way in which, in primitive societies, education was brought about merely through living the expected life. Taught by the example and the simple instruction of those around him, the American Indian or the African tribesman arrived at such wisdom as he needed in his well-integrated and largely stable world.

Creation, not always connected closely with education, is an experience that all may have. Sara, age three, creates a song by changing one word of a song her mother sings her. Now she sings a song that is "her very own." The Pueblo Indian potter varies one line of a traditional volute and knows herself an artist. I read today of an American who devotes his life to improving the effectiveness of the handles we grasp on the tools we use. Such creations are narrow, but they provide the sense of being a creator.

Greater creations may be achieved not only by the professional artists or scholars but by other people who are carrying on some private study for the joy it gives them. That part of the Maya hieroglyphic writing known as the Supplementary Series was deciphered by an American chemical engineer in the course of the journeys by train that he took in connection with his business. The glyphs had been for years a puzzle to specialists. The ancient Mediterranean script known as Linear B, written by the Greeks of Crete and Asia Minor, was recently made readable by the efforts of a young English architect.

The great creations of art and science and scholarship no doubt contribute to the education of those who achieve them and also provide works and ideas which become materials for the education of others. The coming to understand something--to understand it in that degree and kind which makes the thing learned a part of one's mind and self--is a creation, too. In this case the thing made is more private and personal. It is never wholly so. Education is an exchange in which each learner helps build the other as he builds himself.

Learning that educates includes an element of invention. In anthropology we speak of a process called "stimulus diffusion." Peoples learn. from other peoples not only by imitating one another but also by observing one another and then doing something in a different way that reaches the same end. After Chinese porcelain had been coming to Europe for almost two centuries, European potters, stimulated by the beauty of the Chinese product, set themselves the task of finding a way to make it and succeeded. In the early nineteenth century a Cherokee Indian, who was entirely without schooling or knowledge of English, was impressed by the white man's writing and was stimulated to invent, single-handed, a syllabary. He had not grasped the alphabetic principle, but the example of writing that he saw and only partly understood was enough to cause him to invent. It seems to me that my own experience as a teacher might provide examples of learning by stimulus diffusion.