An Incomplete Education

My education, or rather an initial lack of an education, goes to the heart of what it means to be an educated person. My studies at the bachelor’s level mostly stunk! It was possible to get a good education from the school I attended, but I wasn’t in an academic concentration that provided a good education. My best friend in college was in what was then called the arts honors program and he had the best professors and courses. I always thought that separating students that way, honors, compared to the run-of-the-mill courses and professors was extremely unfair, but I don’t know if I would have been mature enough to apply myself to such a rigorous course of study. I did have some good courses, in sociology, drama, and political science, but years of literature and history courses were a bomb! In my sophomore year, I took American history and the professor refused to allow students to ask questions. That professor had a PhD in history from a place where there must have been something in the air that frowned on the Socratic method. I’m past the midpoint of A True History of the United States (Daniel Sjursen, 2021), and I’m pretty much shocked by what I didn’t learn during two semesters of US history in the 1960s. I recall a few decades ago when a series of what I don’t know about this or that subject was all the rage. Those books were mostly flash in the pan sort of books, and they didn’t really examine or enlighten.

I’ve looked at lists of suggested reading from sources such as the New York Times, which provide alternatives for some of the traditional works that supposedly are factored into a quality or good education. I found that some of the alternatives were lacking. For example, George Orwell is regarded as a beacon in terms of his observations about dictatorial regimes, but when I began Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), I found that the some writers’ excuses that had been made for his antisemitism felt flat or spurious, and I couldn’t pick the book up again. I don’t accept the accepted reasoning that educated British society during Orwell’s time had a class prejudice toward Jews. By that standard I would have become a racist growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but I certainly did not!

I’ve tried to read Homer’s The Iliad more times than I will admit. I was stopped cold by its militarism and sexism. The style was so plodding that I finally gave up and read the Odyssey, which I found to be satisfying and more readable. Reading synopses of the poem, The Iliad, seemed like it worked and I got a general sense of the story and characters. I’m surprised that my freshman course in literature, a survey course, didn’t require works like The Iliad, but it’s a little late to approach that text again.

After years of struggling with lists, I came to an epiphany that I found what I had looked for over decades looking at reviews, often in esoteric places for writing in the social sciences and literature that were not typical. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) was not easily accessible, but Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), satisfied at many different levels. From the perspective of a war resister during the Vietnam War era, the latter made lots of sense in relation to the senseless pushback of the government to those who often refused to fight in an insane war. I built a small library around the Vietnam War. All of these efforts must have been successful because a real estate agent suggested that we get rid of what must have been a selection of at least one thousand books to make our home more pleasing to prospective buyers. Unable to cart so many books a long distance, donations to local school libraries worked. At a swap shop at a local so-called transfer station, a guy stopped me with an armful of Britannica encyclopedias saying that his wife had sent him out looking for a set of Britannica encyclopedias that very morning. Serendipitous!

Reading about psychological issues related to male development intrigued me, and that search dovetailed with my study of counseling a few years later. Sometime in the mid 1980s, I began working for a men’s counseling agency, and it would be the first of two such agencies at which I worked. The first group provided counseling to men in groups headed by two leaders. There were mandatory monthly checks chaired by a person associated with the counseling center at a nearby university. The curiosity I originally felt for the subject was quashed by some of the men in that agency who went out of their way to sound like feminists. Though I support feminism wholeheartedly, the forced nature of some of these men’s speeches were so obvious as to seem almost comical. It flowed over into what was soon categorized as being politically correct. The group finally collapsed when an administrator in the group allegedly stole what amounted to tens of thousands of dollars from its coffers. The latter sort of ended any concerns about being politically correct in that agency.

While books available through a state-wide interlibrary online site are sadly mundane and mainline to the extreme, these recommended books by public intellectual Chris Hedges are a good primer in one way to view the self, others, and the world.

I wanted, through education, what Bob Dylan best expressed in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”: “But I’ll know my song well before I start singing.”

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