What is an education? Its meaning is, for our purposes here, two-fold: it is the process of acquiring knowledge, developing reasoning powers, and preparing oneself (and others) intellectually for mature life; it is also the result produced by this process. So, denotatively at least, a degree or grade does not constitute an education and we can effectively remove degrees and grades from our discussion of educational proprietorship.
How does one come to own something? There are a number of ways, some more valid and respectable than others: one can buy it, steal it, have it given to them, or build/grow it themselves. Despite appearances, in the case of education (and economists would say in every case - how does the saying go about free lunches?) there is a price that must be paid in order to receive an education through any of these means.
In the case of buying one's education, one must advance the aforementioned stack of hard-earned cash in addition to time spent studying and in classes. The next means of acquisition is problematic: How exactly does one steal an education? What does it mean to steal? It means "to take without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force," according to dictionary.com. So how can one take an education without permission to do so? I suppose you could sneak onto college campuses and sit in classes which you have not paid to attend and surreptitiously suck the information out of the professor's brain.
Hmm... it appears that what some from other cultural backgrounds would refer to as "stealing," we Americans euphemize into "auditing." And it's both perfectly legal and perfectly ethical. So... if it is legal and ethical, could it possibly be stealing in the truest sense? Probably not.
Sorry, American educational kleptomaniacs, we have logically written you out of existence.
But how could this be? How could something be impossible to steal? 1. It could be so thoroughly well protected that it is pragmatically unapproachable (though a long string of popular heist movies through the last century seem to be trying to inform us that no such thing exists) or 2. It could be free. We've proven that education is not unapproachably well-protected, so it must be that we have implicit permission and right to take it. That is to say, if a person can't steal an education - whoa - education must be free. However, it is only free in a limited sense. But we'll get back to that later. For now, let's move on to the other methods of obtaining ownership of things.
Our next option is to have our education given to us. By appearances, all human beings have their education given to them: the world begins to teach us the moment we emerge from the womb (and maybe even before that). Our parents freely teach us. Teachers in the primary school system impart their wisdom for no monetary cost at all - to us, at least, since the burden of paying taxes to support this formal school system falls upon our parents at that age.
But is there a fundamental price to be paid for all of this having an education handed to us? Of course. It is our time and our effort. So having an education freely handed over is entirely different than having, say, a
Could it be impossible to have one's education handed over to one, at least in the truest sense? I would say so. While some children complain of having an education forced into their hands, the truth is that they are being forced to pay the price of receiving that education.
And thus we reach our last means of obtaining ownership of things: to build or grow said things oneself. But doesn't everyone build or grow their education themselves? What again is the process of education? Acquiring knowledge (no one is going to acquire it for you), developing reasoning powers (no one is going to develop them for you), and preparing oneself intellectually for mature life. Preparation is a funny thing, for there is a fundamental difference between preparing oneself and preparing a lunch or other external commodity. Your best friend can prepare your lunch for you, if they find the goodness in their heart to do so. So could your spouse. For that matter, a complete stranger could prepare your lunch for you - though in that case you'd probably be want to be a little more wary about said lunch's contents. But only you can prepare yourself. Some may help through mentorship, tutelage, teaching, coaxing and encouraging, but when all is said and done, unless you choose to actively prepare yourself, no preparation will occur. There are countless schoolchildren who have acquisition, development and intellectual preparation foisted upon them who nonetheless fail to acquire, develop or prepare, for they cannot have that which they do not choose to acquire themselves.
So one can't steal one's education for two reasons that, juxtaposed, form an interesting paradox: an education is always free, but there is also a price that must inevitably be paid for it - time and effort. Sorry, intellectual pickpurses. And one can't have education handed to them, for there is a price to be paid in, once again, time and effort, no matter how freely education is offered. And if a person wants an education, they will inevitably build it themselves, for, though they may be paying a price in time and effort, who are they truly paying that price to? One does not pay one's time and effort to one's professors, parents, gurus or Sunday School Teachers, for these educators cannot possibly benefit from one's toil. Thus it must follow, as the night the day, the price of education can be paid only to oneself. Thus, every human being alive builds his or her own education within her or himself.
But how do we maintain motivation to go on building our educations?
Society's answer brings us back to our first method of attainment: monetary purchase. Some say that paying for their education with that money which they have toiled so heavily to earn ensures that they will follow through with their investment, for they would not wish to have spent so much money in vain.
On this point, let me wax analogous for a moment:
An education is a structure within one's soul that has the capacity to surpass the beauty of the most artful physical architecture of which man has the capacity to conceive. The burden of building this building falls on that man or woman who desires to possess it and cannot be delegated to any other. There are, however, countless other builders (parents, teachers, professors, great thinkers from ages past) who have supplied construction materials - I-beams, steel girders, shingles, bricks, mortar, glass for windows, etc. - in the form of ideas. Each of us have a few good and bad ideas in the mix. Once in a while, we stumble upon a certain innovative combination of these construction materials that has never before been used, but we rarely ever make up the raw stuff itself on our own.
As human nature would have it, many of us lack the motivation to do this work unsupervised. After all, in our growing up years we always had someone to watch us and coax us along in our work. And we don't always find the pleasure of seeing our work unfold motivation enough to carry on in our labor. While we recognize that the rewards of building this building are enormous, we lack the innate joy that comes from building it. One way or the other, we must find a way to keep up our motivation to build.
Society, on seeing our plight, suggests that we hire someone, a personal trainer of sorts, to motivate our actions. How novel! But there is a price to be paid in money to such people. So off we go to make some money, putting off building our educations. These diverting, money-making activities may once in a while provide materials we can use to build our building, but for the most part they just provide hard, cold cash. And our buildings either retard or stop completely in their growth. But that is the price we must pay to hire out motivation.
At last, we have saved up enough to hire a personal trainer to keep us motivated. If we are lucky enough, that is, for those we hire to be personal trainers in nature. More often than not, we get a slave driver to crack the whip on our backs until the glorious structure is completed. But build it we do, and perhaps at a faster pace than we had been building it before. But at what price! In addition to time and effort, we pay a price in money and the time it takes to make it as well as the enormous personal pain that is caused by the deep lashes on our backs. In the meantime, without even realizing that it has happened, we have come to no longer think of this glorious edifice as our own structure, but as the property of this demon overlord who so furiously demands that we build it. And so, with time, all the pleasure that comes with seeing the building rise, brick by brick, is replaced with a hope that someday it will be sufficient enough for our whip-cracking motivator to be satisfied and leave off lording over us.
Of course, as I mentioned before, some people are lucky enough that they can find a motivator who is not a slavedriver, but is perhaps more like the Jillian Michaels of the education world, or a friendly and encouraging wilderness guide. But often, the effect is much the same - ownership (in one's mind, at least) is transferred from the learner to the motivator.
So tell me, friends, is it worth it? Is it worth it to pay a monetary price, only to shift the ownership of one's very dreams to someone else and cease taking pleasure in them?
There is a better way, and that is to become like little children. I believe that, in childhood, none of us struggle to find the motivation to learn, for, in Emerson's words, "children are all foreigners." Many a parent both bewails and celebrates that stage of constant questioning that most children go through. For children it seems to be an effortless exercise to formulate profoundly thought-provoking questions. One of my most influential high-school teachers once related a story in which her daughter, after having passed by a team of horses, asked, "Mom? When horses look at each other, do they know that they are horses?" Children have achieved that pinnacle of inquiry wherein they can ask those questions which we have no conceivable way of answering.
So what happens to this insatiable curiosity? Does it get satiated? Does learning become less important after we have a fundamental understanding of how to survive in the world? I don't think so. At some point, some stranger will usually take ownership of our education. We are shepherded into the school system, and we are conveniently provided with teachers who will act both as guides - to answer the questions we have not asked - and efficient motivators who provide tests and grades (not to mention furnishing us with graham crackers and chocolate milk after our midday nap).
For most of us, our questioning nature - our unquenchable thirst for learning - is resilient for a little while, but eventually we come to resentfully hand over the stewardship of our education to our teachers. There are those few, however, who refuse to relinquish their God-given right to own and dictate the course of their own educations. Sometimes these prodigious learners come to see the schooling system as an enormous playground of knowledge that will provide them with answers to questions that would be difficult to answer on their own, love their primary and secondary school experience and are enormously successful. Others of these learners flounder in the school system despite their considerable genius, becoming intellectual renegades that, even subconsciously, refuse to comply with the system that they see as attempting to take control of their autonomy.The rest of us accept our lot, coming to view the majority of teachers as slave-drivers, putting in our quota of schoolwork to graduate but coming to see the act of building our edifice of education as a chore we must fulfill in order to alleviate the demands of our parents and our teachers. Of course, the moment we receive our diplomas and these authority figures stop reminding us the degree-less are usually penniless, we stop putting in the time and effort, preferring to make lots of money and indulge ourselves in other pleasures than those intellectual pursuits, for education has become no longer a joy but a burden to be fled at the first possible moment. that we don't bother to learn is indeed tragic, but I think the greatest tragedy is that we have forgotten our innate capability to make education happen for ourselves. Not only do we not bother to learn on our own, we think we can't.
Now, don't get me wrong: my issue here is not with teachers and parents who have the well-placed intention of providing us with an education. It is with us, the brute majority of human beings, who assign ownership of our education to anyone besides ourselves. And I am absolutely a member of that class. But there has come a moment of realization for me - a remembrance of sorts. Today I looked at the sky and I wondered, "Why is the sky blue?" and realized that I don't know the answer. Today I saw the humble cottage that I've made so far of my education - it's in slight disrepair this summer as I have gotten out from under the lash of my professors, and it's an all right place to live in. But I feel a thrill to think that I have proprietorship of it - that I can make of it whatever I so choose, that I can make of it the temple that it was always meant to be. Looks like it is finally time for a major renovation.
But where do I start? The command to "start by taking ownership of your education!" seems like a pretty tall order. I need a plan or I will ultimately flounder and fail. And there is a plan available which will set me on the path to education proprietorship. It is known as pandidactism.
The first step of pandidactism is this: take inventory of that which you have a desire to learn. For the first twelve years of our schooling, we are constantly furnished with answers to those questions which we have not asked. Once the smoke has cleared and a moment of realization has occurred, we must ask ourselves - what are my questions? what do I have a genuine desire to learn about?
I took this first step in a musty old used bookstore on Main Street in Salt Lake City. The list I compiled included Philosophy, French Language and History, the History of New York City, modern music composition theory and a number of other subjects I had long yearned to understand but had never taken the time to do so. Of course, we must formulate a plan for learning this material, which can be as simple as picking up a For Dummies book or as complicated as following college curricula, but planning our journey flows fairly naturally after we have chosen the journey we wish to pursue.
The next step is to prescribe to a method which will help us to effectively acquire and solidify this information. We can, of course, read books and seek out mentors who will not proffer unasked-for counsel, but rather answer our questions, confirm or deny our assumptions and set us on a path toward scholastic success. But, even more powerfully, we can, immediately upon learning, set about helping to build the education of others. By spending time teaching newly-learned material, adding material to the buildings of others, we find our own educational structures becoming exponentially more structurally sound and more magnificent.
Suddenly, we are the masters of our own fate. While we may have some we turn to for counsel when our building struggles, we have not contracted out our education. There is no one in charge of this building process but ourselves. We come once more to realize the very joyful nature of inquiry that we experienced as children.
So pandidactism leads us to ownership of education and ownership of education leads to a renewed motivation to learn, which in turn plunges us back into the pandidactic pursuit, creating a cycle of perpetual learning. Adam Smith postulated in The Wealth of Nations that often, when individuals act in their own self-interest, society as a whole will benefit. Such is the case in that central quest of human existence - knowledge. If each of us could recognize the powerful effect that teaching others could have upon our own learning and act upon that knowledge, the intelligence of our generation, our society, our world would flourish in a way that we can scarcely imagine in our current compartmentalized collegiate culture.
I am a builder. I have my tools in hand. And, if you will join me, I am prepared to build not just a simple home, but a city.
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