Graduation season. Tassels in the air. Enough of books! Time for career, family, life!
Bad thinking. Education should be the goal of education, not what we learn but that we learn – non-stop till our hard stop.
The brain is a body part which, like any, requires exercise and nutrition to stay fit. Use it or lose it. In today’s America we treat intellection as misdirection. Lifelong learning is deprecated as a harmless hobby, pasty, slightly pathetic. Real men guzzle beer, play golf, collect cars, shape their abs. Who’d be caught dead reading a textbook if they didn’t have to! “Egghead” ‘s our handy pejorative. Popularized in the 1952 Presidential campaign as a put-down of cerebral Adlai Stevenson, it may have been Stevenson’s baldness that suggested the likeness, or eggs’ brittleness when dropped.
(Eggs to me mean life, nutrition, their perfect shape evidence of nature’s aesthetic genius. I’m guessing life will be emerging from eggs long after human screw-ups have obsoleted wombs.)
Our consumer economy decries thought. Thinking folks are less likely to overindulge, overspend, waste, gorge, blow their wad on superfluities. Reading a book diverts potential spenders from costlier distractions. Two tickets to a Taylor Swift concert could buy you a library for a lifetime, depending on your reading rate. As a reader and scribbler, I’m a low maintenance retiree: America would go broke if we were all Thoreau!
Learning takes effort, to which our American majority is allergic. Ease, easy, relax, carefree are happy words in our lexicon, while their antonyms repel. True, when it comes to gyms, “no pain, no gain,” but that’s body-buffing to gain admirers unconvinced by one’s conversation. A friend once told me, “Smart is sexy.” In today’s America, that sentiment is rare.
Self-defensively – and ashamedly? – the majority gang up against eggheads, pointy-heads, the intellectual “elite”. Town resents gown for good reason. Smarter people get better jobs, earn more, and prefer one another’s company, making dese-and-dose dopes feel misprized. Smarter people compound the conflict by condescending. When candidate Hillary dismissed uninformed voters as “deplorables,” she was voicing the sentiment of her set. Trump’s fanatic followers pride themselves on their antipathy to intelligence. Don’t bother them with facts, they KNOW!
Could be it was always thus. Brainpower discriminates, and those who get less can’t be pleased. Quicker-witted troglodytes were likely stoned by a “confederacy of dunces.” (“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him,” wrote Jonathan Swift, sounding a lot like Hillary.)
This cause may be hopeless, but why not make education lifelong: no more airborne tassels, on to our next assignment, then our next? Grade and reward us as we make our way. Sell learning as a health initiative: active minds resist dementia and other tragic petrifactions. Spend our wits not on Wordle but the world’s wonders. Your college commencement is just that – the start, not the end, of an avid adventure.
For this visionary – and improbable – tomorrow, I volunteer as coach: nutritionist may be more apt. Let me cook up morsels of mystery for your delectation, digestion, fortification. Not hard to find, they’re wherever you look. My job isn’t to tell you what to think, like a preacher or teacher, but to join you in thinking, as a sort of dance partner. Musing’s so amusing – why not make it fashionable?
I’m preaching to the choir, I realize. Pondering grows less popular as literacy wanes. Hissing headlines make thinking feel oldfangled, outmoded, passé. Hectic doing, spending, sweating, who has time to think!
Our brains should sue for neglect.