“One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
Like many of those suffering through the dry, endless, prosaic hours of the classroom, I struggled during the years of my education to pay attention to what the teacher had demanded, cajoling schoolchildren that had long since divided themselves into the tiers of institutional excellence: the obsequious and the fawning, the girly brown-noses, the front-rowers, the A-students; the middle rows of the mediocre, interspersed with the occasional starlet; the back rows, the truants, the errant boys enjoying soccer and recess more than schoolwork, the class clowns, the slackers, and the purely inflammatory.
Located somewhere between the middle and the back, a worse-than-mediocre jokester playing along to get along, I was a sufferer of these schools that entrapped me in dank, stuffy classrooms with limited sunlight; from the vantage of an impartial observer, I was a pedestrian clown and runty schoolchild whose hopes were those of the white-collar worker dwelling in offices, which seemed so similar to the classroom that I would become queasy thinking about them.
But then as now, all was not as it seemed. I was intelligent, but rebellious and self-directed; the fires of my rebelliousness, meeting the nonnegotiable demands of the teacher in so stifling an environment, would react as to a bellows, and by digging in my heels I would make tasks and assignments harder for myself. There was no end to this vicious and silent struggle within the undeveloped, vigorous mind of a little boyish tyrant, and I persisted endlessly without understanding, or being able to understand, the nature of the educational system in which I found myself—a childhood prisoner wearing benign chains that were chafing, but slowly and over many years.
Floating was a distant star, but I had yet to realize what it meant; only years later, in retrospect, have I started to penetrate these miasmic memories to determine their nature, which is more pernicious—as understood by the experience of childhood—than most modern pedagogues are willing to admit. Classroom pedagogy as well as public education are deficient because they preclude what is the lifeblood of all learning: initiative. Repetitive curricula and top-down, imperious assignments that alienate the developing intellect, cut off the wonder and genuine curiosity of the child at the source; resulting in obedience inculcating what is a learned apathy to all learning, this system of education harms more than it helps, however necessary its organization as a societal glue of hierarchies and mobility.
One could thus say that public education in the United States of America benefits the average aggregate of the masses, soundly retaining its role as an institution, but deprives the individual student of the initiative, curiosity, and intellectual development requisite to living a fulfilled, independent life as a human being. The distant star floating above the dungeon-classrooms of my childhood, a star of learning and wonder, a quenchless thirst for what was being denied to me, as a giant, pedagogical thumb pressing into the jugular of my curiosity—this became apparent much later, when I learned to shed old habits and establish for myself the initiative for which my child-self had long been yearning.
Education is self-education, which presupposes the presence of initiative, and thus volition, curiosity, and the wonder accompanying the urgent path to discovery. Although modern public education inculcates a passive obedience, precluding excitement and curiosity, stunting the intellects of those whose desire to learn has been tainted, self-education offers a means of developing the mind and achieving intellectual maturity—an attribute that most American adults do not possess.
In his wise and inspiring book, The Rapture of Maturity, Charles D. Hayes describes the importance of reaching that maturity, writing that “intellectual maturity is a function of deliberate learning, not of age. True adulthood is not possible without it.”[1] This is the adulthood and independence that public education stifles and discourages, leading to a travesty of education that many students, after finishing their classroom years, would readily corroborate.
But the past has buried the years and the childhood opportunities, so that the post-secondary years and that onramp to emerging adulthood enlivening adolescence with the newness of the world, the first gusts of independence, should be seized by those yearning for their own questions and their own answers. Time is plentiful for self-education at any age, but especially for those under thirty.
Developing Mature Interests
One learns in school that knowledge is the perishable means to achieving high grades, and after receiving them, one can abandon this veneer of attachment and interest in order to make way for the next. But acquiring knowledge with self-education entails a deeper, more vital learning, resulting in higher retention and a greater personal attachment to what one has learned.
Whereas the learning of the school is transient and ad hoc, that of self-education is transformative and becomes a part of the identity; this making of oneself by self-education, by initiative and authentic curiosity, exemplifies the spirit of what Hayes describes as “my conviction that an education should be thought of not as something you get but as something you take.”[2] It is thus active, as opposed to passive—the watchword of most classrooms withholding children from the daylight—enabling agency, motivation, and the enhancement of selfhood as one becomes more subtle, and more profound, as a human being.
Acquiring knowledge by self-education confers a number of benefits, one of which is the opportunity to develop “mature interests,” by which I mean “a level of interest about any subject powerful enough to become a self-sustaining form of motivation,” so that curiosity within a domain of knowledge perpetuates itself, leading to the development of what one could call passion.[3] This is passion of the intellect, entailing different sensations from those of the nonintellectual passions: it is that innate self-satisfaction of recognizing that knowing more about a subject, that knowing that one has acquired this knowledge, actually enhance the subject and give one “ownership” of it.
The self-sustaining interest, the mature interest, is thus the developmental phase of an intellectual passion. The learner now “owns” the subject because he has made it his own. I’m convinced that what those who know less call “pretension” is merely the excess of this intellectual passion, the apparent self-satisfaction of having acquired ownership of a subject. This self-satisfaction often comes off as smugness or pretension, but I consider it benign and remediable—just be socially adept and temper the passion in relevant contexts. Don’t be excessive, but continue to learn.
Another benefit conferred by the passions is the acquiring of what is called a “dissipative structure,” which Hayes describes as releasing “angst through a journey of considerations not available to those who lack the knowledge necessary to explore a problem instead of reacting violently to it.”[4] In essence, learning alleviates anxiety because it furnishes more to think about than the ignorant, uneducated mind. Humans often struggle to imagine not knowing, to empathize with a more ignorant cognition, leading to an unbridgeable distance between those who know and know not.
Hayes writes of scholars that, “possessed of certain knowledge, they have difficulty imagining what life would be like without it,” suggesting the limitations of empathy, and the islanding of the human consciousness. We often fail to empathize with any other experience of the world than our own (one saving grace being art.) The educated thus struggle to imagine the cognition of the uneducated, and vice versa, leading to mutually unintelligible worldviews and experiences.
Intellectual Maturity as Freedom
This distance separating human cognition, and thus human experiences of the world, results in the inevitable conclusion that no “right” way to experience the world exists; human experience, as a byproduct of differences in cognition and consciousness, is diverse and multifarious, so that no one experience of the world can be privileged over others. A child growing up in Western culture, inferring from popular culture and the media those conventions by which we all function, enduring years of school that inculcate these precedents of convention pervading his culture, learns to acquire only the simulacrum of the individualism that has long been the American ethos.
But perhaps he senses that the deeper and more profound experiences of life have been hidden form him, that he has been entrapped by unspoken expectations and assumptions about a reality whose nature he must determine himself. For it is a paradox that the most individualistic country in the world establishes the most forceful status quo while neglecting the actual mainsprings of individualism: freedom of thought, independence of mind, and intellectual maturity. These are the pathways to freedom as such.
Of course many Americans, some of them scholars and others bedside intellectuals, journalists, armchair philosophers, and skeptics, are intellectually mature and independent, capable of coming to their own conclusions and establishing their own precedents of experience. But I would contend that these make up the minority that has achieved intellectual maturity and independence of mind, while the majority wallows without the self-ignition and the curiosity requisite to achieving this freedom.
In this contention, I follow the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who posited that one is not “granted” freedom, however appealing that possibility seems to those agitating for their “rights” and political freedoms—one becomes free, one achieves freedom, thereby substantiating that the free person is a warrior, as Nietzsche conceived it. The myriad political rights codified by the Constitution of the United States are the requisites to actual freedom and independence, “individualism” in its fullest sense, but they are not “freedom” itself.
Because my worldview has been irrevocably shaped by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, in all the best ways, the Nietzschean spirit has pervaded much of this article, the individualism and elitism that have long justified his being designated as both a “father” of existentialism as a philosophy, and a controversial historical figure.
However controversial, his philosophy is invaluable to those looking for self-determination, for an experience of life presupposing that life has to be experienced, that its value is not innate but indefinite, that one has to determine the value of life for oneself: “One must be all means stretch out one’s fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols, “that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason,” and he goes on to assert that all value judgments of life are not ipso facto judgments, but symptoms of the judge.[5]
The compelling corollary of this contention is that one should not attempt to evaluate life while living, but determine the value of life as an individual experience, the value of your life. What does life mean to you? How should you live it? What are the limits of your own experience?
This is all to say, ultimately, that to pursue intellectual maturity is to pursue an abiding intellectual freedom that is the precondition of all freedom, of human autonomy, and of independence. So I come to the end, when I should encourage myself as much as the reader—the only possible conclusion to something that I haven’t myself finished:
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