Why education?

I often find myself intrigued by my niece's blog, and her latest entry about learning to crochet is no exception. Tassina wrote eloquently about the tension between two types of education/learning: the academic sort, where theory predominates, and the practical sort, the hands-on learning that is so useful and necessary. Since this is a topic I've spent some time thinking about, maybe I should spend some time writing about it, too.

Let's start with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's a flawed theory, but it works for this purpose. The very basic needs are needs that must be met in order for people to stay alive. A person doesn't care about self-actualization or living up to her highest ability if she is too concerned about where her next meal is coming from. We need to sleep, we need to have sex, we need to breathe clean air and drink clean water. But once those needs are met, our next concern is safety--not just being safe from natural disasters and wild animals, but safety in terms of having a job and a steady paycheck, too. (That's a need that can directly affect the lowest level, obviously.) One step up is love and belonging. If you have enough food to eat, a safe place to live in, and so forth, you need to be able to share it. That's why Robinson Crusoe was so happy to find Friday. He was desperately lonely.

Once we have others around us, groups to which we belong (hence, the popularity of church groups), we need to hold ourselves in esteem and we need others to hold us in esteem. That's why "dissing" someone is such a major point with most people, not just those in minority subcultures. To insult someone is to remove or diminish that person's esteem for him/herself. If a person is artistic, the worst thing in the world is for someone else to criticize the artistic person's ability or product. (It's why many actors won't read or listen to reviews by critics.)

Only after those needs are satisfied (according to Maslow) will we attempt to self-actualize, to be all that we can be, to live life to the fullest. Like others have before me, I think Maslow's explanation is too simplistic. I think that for some people, the need to self-actualize is tremendously powerful and can affect needs on the levels below. (The starving artist?)

But to address Tassina's statements more directly about the value of the differing kinds of knowledge and education: In my experience, I've known a lot of intelligent and well-educated people who were not creative. But I've never known a creative person who was not intelligent. One book I highly recommend is Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, but even beyond his work, I recommend Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences and Frames of Mind. Most people are intelligent in more than one way. My husband is highly logical, extremely good with math, and very creative with his camera. He is an idiot at foreign languages, however. My son Daniel is extremely right-brained and creative. He can play many musical instruments and writes extremely well, but he can't do math and struggles with numbers and logical quantitative concepts, though he is very good at verbal logic. My son Stephen is extremely logical, good at math and science, and equally good at verbal skills. He's musical and adventurous and creative, just not artistic (or so he says). I disagree. I think he has an innate artistic sense that comes out in virtually everything he does.

I myself am verbally logical, and I love reading, writing, and arguing. But just as much, I love art and creativity. I sew, crochet, paint, do other crafts, and love to listen to music. I'm not good with foreign languages, but even as a child, a friend and I had developed a code that we used for communicating with each other and not getting caught passing notes by the teacher. I can still write and read that code. I kept my diaries in it for years. I love crossword puzzles and hate sudoku.

So essentially, in this inductive argument, what I am saying is this: most of us have and use more than one kind of intelligence. We are balanced and thus happier when we can use the practical intelligences as well as the theoretical intelligences. To truly self-actualize, an intelligent person needs to go beyond just knowing "how" and must learn "why": it's not enough that I can put paint on canvas and create a pleasing result. I want to know why placing that spot of bright yellow against that purple background has a different effect on the viewer than if that same spot of bright yellow was on a white background. So I study theories of art and color and design. As a writer, I can somewhat instinctively create a reasonably good argument, but having studied the history and principles of argument, I can make a much better argument, and I can see the flaws in lesser arguments.

BUT: we don't necessarily have to go to college in order to achieve the knowledge of "why"--and, like Tassina, I often felt stifled by the lower levels of education. The problem solves itself once a learner goes beyond the basics and is in an educational environment where she is being challenged and has to truly engage in order to learn and understand. That didn't happen for me until graduate school. I fear it won't happen for Tassina if she doesn't continue to educate herself by reading philosophy and psychology and other challenging texts. She also needs to surround herself with people who don't "settle" for the easy, quick, obvious solutions to problems.

I've got a problem to solve that involves the "reading room," so I'll end this blog. But it's a topic that I could write about for hours.