“Where Love and Need Are One”

To the contemporary demand for “relevance” in education—a plea with which few would argue—we need to add an equal concern for perspective, lest relevance degenerate into the least positive meaning of expediency. If we need to come out of our ivory towers, we should not have to spend most of our time and energy dodging cars in the street. Jumping when someone blows a horn at us may be necessary to survival at a given moment, but a panicked response is no long-range solution to traffic congestion. Our need for immediate answers must not preclude determination to find basic solutions.

Concerning basic solutions, the perennial relevance of liberal arts studies is that they help us refocus and restate questions instead of concentrating so exclusively on answers that we neglect the assumptions grounding the way we have formulated our problems. An apocryphal story about Gertrude Stein is appropriate here. Ms. Stein was on her deathbed, and had been in a coma for several hours. Her devoted companion, Alice Toklas, was at her side. Wanting one last bit of wisdom from her longtime mentor, Ms. Toklas repeated over and over: “Gertrude, what is the answer?” Suddenly, Ms. Stein sat up, and with her usual crispness asked, “What is the question?”

I fear that most of us are more eager to supply answers than we are to provide perceptive questions. The old saying that “asking the right questions is more than half the solution” may be a platitude, but our enchantment with answers continues. At a time when technology has increased, our capacity to give unusually massive or inhumanly consistent answers makes us take comfort in mass and consistency. Consider, for example, the fact that in areas like politics or economics we can make simulations that involve a staggering series of computations and apparently achieve an impressive degree of predictability. The success of these simulations may obscure the fact that they depend on highly sophisticated and discriminating questions. The wonder of the whole process is less the speed of the computer than the skill of the people who write the programs.

What an educational revolution we could generate if, somehow, we could persuade people to look freshly at their problems. Asking probing questions is one way to reconsider our problems, but other ways are equally helpful. For example, my own experience has taught me how shockingly different a situation appears when it is divested of terminology that is more conclusive than descriptive. I learned that lesson shortly after my wife and I were hired as house parents in a Bronx “home for the friendless.” None of the 11- or 12-year-old boys in our charge was an orphan, but each had been placed in the home by the city; most had been in trouble with the law.

In our employment interview, the director emphasized that we were not to speak of our boys as hoodlums or delinquents, but only as “disturbed children.” We smiled a bit at this but soon understood it—without smiles—after I had to disarm a youngster of an obviously used switchblade. Specifically, when I told him it was bedtime, he reacted by clicking the knife open and demanding that I make him go to bed. After “making him,” I angrily reported to my wife that I would continue doing so if that was what those young “hoodlums” wanted. I caught myself then, knowing even as I said the word why I had been warned not to use it. After all, everyone knows what we do with hoodlums: we beat them. When I used the word, I did so to justify whatever measures I needed to take. But when I thought of my charge as a “disturbed child,” I remembered how young he really was and how frightened his eyes had been behind the bravado of his actions. Somehow I needed to account for those eyes as well as the knife; I needed to understand as well as discipline.

While we all need to understand, we cannot gain understanding by simply shifting terms. Instead, we need to become aware of differences. Indeed, unless we are prepared to genuinely sense differences, we can live quite smugly in a verbal world filled with numerous synonyms. In our smugness, we probably will not recognize that our world faithfully reflects the narrow, oversimplified view of our undiscriminating vocabulary. As we inhabit this world, our eyes become accustomed to semi-darkness. Therefore, if the wonder of a universe created by connotation and nuance is suddenly opened to us, we cannot bear it. The semi-darkness in which we live simply cannot tolerate so much light. For that reason, we need a more gradual introduction to the universe. Education provides that introduction. In fact, education—particularly adult education—offers the enviable opportunity of gradually but irresistibly revealing the exciting world that is the province of a cultured mind.

If I seem to be talking about people who are more advanced than the students we encounter here at Brigham Young University, I surely am not. I remember a brief exchange with a welder on my shipyard crew during World War II. As our graveyard shift was coming to an end, the dawn broke in soft radiance over the water and I murmured some lines from Homer. My unlettered friend found Homer’s “rose-fingered dawn” an interesting but inadequate description. Yet it stirred him to his own fresh, if somewhat awkward, imagery for the look of the coming day. As we punched out, he casually asked me the name of “that fella who talked about the dawn’s hand.” Homer might not have gained an immediate admirer that morning, but something besides the sun was dawning. How ready was my friend for an introduction to the classics?

While the inexperienced may need to extend their world, those with an essentially theoretical education may likewise need to do so. To illustrate, I recall the delight I experienced when I first came upon Walt Whitman’s description of the sound a carpenter’s plane makes when it is used. The line is: “His foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp.” I knew that Whitman must have been a carpenter, as I was at the time. I was a little dashed to find that the other carpenters on the job did not find the line particularly exciting. I decided that what those men needed was a course in poetry. But I was far more disappointed when I later tried the same line out on a beginning poetry class. My students appreciated the line even less than the carpenters did, and I suddenly realized that what my students needed was some lessons in carpentry! Only would-be-poets who were also carpenters could get the full flavor of a line written by the poet-carpenter Whitman.

While extending our narrow worlds is important, we must also understand that the lasting satisfactions in life are tied in one way or another to control. Indulgence may be pleasurable, but repeated indulgence is usually degenerative, and it offers little on which the memory may browse contentedly. But that which I have learned to control gives me unending delight. People who sew or bake skillfully, or those who know the thrill of precise hand/eye coordination, experience a satisfaction that can only be purchased with effort and repossessed in developing mastery.

I should not have to belabor the need for continuing education in an age of increasing leisure. Economists warn us that the hours we spend away from our jobs may soon match the time we use to make a living. Significantly, such statements are usually given as a warning. The evidence that we are not prepared for such an eventuality seems beyond question. Consider the relentlessly bright smiles of those who have retired to “golden age” villas, where they can spend full time in leisure activity; those smiles give the whole cheat of hobby life away. A hobby is enjoyable because it interrupts routine. When a hobby becomes the routine, only those activities that demand growth remain fulfilling.

Education should be fulfilling, but we must avoid placing too much emphasis on its endowment features. Indeed, the uncertainties of modern life suggest that gaining an education needs to be currently worthwhile as well as potentially valuable. Henry David Thoreau, for example, once heard a young man complain about having to work at a disagreeable job and save his money so that one day he could afford to quit working and simply write poetry. Thoreau’s comment was quietly devastating: he suggested that the young man go up to his garret and begin to write. If the young man really wanted to write poetry, he could probably manage to do it. If he wanted nothing more than to be a poet—that is, if he only wanted the appearance rather than the substance—he was due for a rude disappointment that money could never solve.

Perhaps the greatest enemy of extended education is the stereotype that many of us carry—consciously or unconsciously—of the educated person. Like the would-be-poet of Thoreau’s acquaintance, we want to be educated rather than get an education. We promise ourselves that someday we will read the great works, enjoy classical music, attend the ballet, and stun our friends with learned allusions and impeccable taste. As we grow older, we occasionally twitch quietly to think that the great books we own merely decorate our homes, their pages essentially uncut. Meanwhile, the music we once purchased in pride and anticipation, determined that our children at least be engulfed in cultivated sound, gathers dust on the shelves.

Rather than committing ourselves to hard work, all too often we try to skip the very apprenticeship that alone can make our appreciation real. Television and other media condition us to expect dramatic breakthroughs, and we yearn, if a trifle incoherently, for the prize without the effort. Remember how we smile at Alice in Wonderland when all who run are declared winners and must be given prizes? Our own romantic expectations are far more ludicrous.

Yet in our yearning and expectations—however extravagant—hope and promise remain. Indeed, despite disheartening obstacles, the disadvantaged have never had so many avenues of escape as they do today. Never have those whose formal schooling was interrupted been offered such skillful and sympathetic help. Never have so many classes been sponsored by so many agencies. Never have employers been so encouraging, and never have the rewards of achievement been more tangible. In contrast, however, never have the processes by which we apprehend our environment and develop our talents been so dehumanized. We are told—often a bit ostentatiously—that the cybernetic age, in which machines talk to and direct other machines, is upon us. I fear that some of the machines to which the machines are talking used to be called humans. The challenge of education today—whether in formal or informal settings— is not simply to keep up with the inundation of information beating upon every education agency. Rather, education must provide the uniquely human wholeness that no machine can match.

If we hope to successfully meet the challenge confronting us, we must do more than indulge hobbies and refine tastes. In the words of Robert Frost, we must unite vocation and avocation. For only “where love and need are one”¹—when that which we choose to do and that which we must do support and refresh each other—can we partake of that integration of personality which distinguishes the man whose education is satisfying, challenging, and inspiring.