Education's Essential Truths (Part I)

Education enables people to put their lives in order, to put the world in order, to know what things are more important than other things. 

It’s also power—power to overcome one’s past, to change one’s present, and to shape the obstacles and opportunities that will determine one’s future.  Education gives us the means to provide for ourselves and our families, while also being, as James Madison recognized, “the only guardian of true Liberty.” It’s literally the key to our happiness; so we’re wise to get it right.

Here’s Education’s Essential Truths, Part I:

(1) Mothers Matter Most.  Long before research clearly illustrated just how right he was, Brigham Young noted, “If you educate a man, you educate a man. If you educate a woman, you educate a generation.” Nothing will influence future world peace and prosperity more than the number of mothers we can educate and thus turn into educators.

Mothers matter more than teacher quality, school quality, more than socio-economic status, you name it—mothers matter most.  If the only public policy we get right in the 21st century is “Educate the Women,” we’ll be fine. The rest will all fall in place. And for the mothers/parents for whom it may be “too late” to educate, we can still help them become educators.  Witness Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson’s story:

We lived in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. And my mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school. She prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they could control their own lives?

Then God gave her the wisdom…at least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. She turned off the TV; let us watch only two or three TV programs a week. And with all that spare time, we had to read books from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports.  After a few days, we’d get them back – all marked up with highlighter and check marks...  Turns out, she couldn't read what we gave her; but we didn't know that.

I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends – even her brothers and sisters – would criticize her. My mother didn't care.

After a while, however, I actually began to enjoy reading those books.  Because we were very poor; but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind those decisions. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. It made all the difference.

(2) We already know the Answer. Learning is fun, learning is pleasing – our brains even produce pleasurable chemicals when it happens. If we’re lucky, we get addicted to those chemicals. Thing is, learning only happens after we expend some effort. And there’s the rub: sometimes the effort that’s required to learn isn’t all that much fun.  What’s worse, sometimes our work doesn’t even pay off.  Whenever we do the wrong work—or the right work in the wrong doses—the learning and fun never come. It can be heartbreakingly discouraging.

So mankind has spent centuries looking for workarounds:  ways to either live without learning or learn without working. And that search continues today – a fool’s errand in the truest sense of the phrase. Learning – real learning – the kind of learning that produces self-satisfaction and real fulfillment is, at its core, a “menace” that we can’t get around.*

And yet, if we apply the right approaches, we can help each child find his or her secret genius – the secret only they can find and only they can unlock. If we put our kids through the right progression, they’ll feel the addictive sensation of learning often enough to want to keep going. And that’s when the real fun starts – when everywhere we turn, people are finally placing the most important things first, the second most important things second, the third most important things third, and so on, and so on…

[Part II, March 19th]

* The "Menace" of the Excellent:  “A university worth attending is one where the students are brought into personal contact with “the aura and the menace of the excellent.”  When they have “seen, heard, or ‘smelled’ the fever of those who chase after disinterested truth, some after-gleam of this experience will remain even if they end up living quite average lives, and it will protect them against emptiness.”  –George Steiner