NEW YORK – Growing up in Chicago, nobody taught me to be an education hater.
Yes, my teachers presumed that grammar and math and history were my good fortune to learn. And I hated all that instruction about nothing.

But it wasn’t my teachers who taught me to loathe learning, because I despised extra-curricular education more.
Yes, my father presumed that baseball was my destiny and he coached into me hitting philosophies and fielding fundamentals and training disciplines. And I hated all that exercise about nothing.
But it wasn’t my dad the coach who fueled my reproach for learning, because I despised social education still more.
Yes, my peers presumed that my idea of success was acceptance, and that my idea of happiness was popularity. And I hated all that posturing about nothing.
But it wasn’t my friends who chilled my yearning for learning, because what I despised most of all was self-education.
I despised self-education for the same reason that I despised all education: I was always offended by people telling me what to do.
It all started from my earliest acquaintance with my conscience; I never wanted to listen to my own voice.

As a result, I grew up learning nothing and believing nothing and seeing nothing wrong with knowing nothing.
No doubt my experience is difficult to relate to for many people. But I’ve found that the place I wound up as a consequence is not so different from the place other baby busters wound up, with their midlife ahead of them and their education behind them.
There I was, a man near 30. I was a husband and a father, a nine-to-fiver and an every-night partier. I had no knowledge about life-changing thought. I had every intention to lead the unexamined life by living through the body.
When the anxiety hit, I swiped back with gin. When love wouldn’t trade, I let it fade. When I became incoherent to myself I pursued oblivion. But I could only go on so long being my own unhappiness.

What came next should never have happened to a man like me. But it did. And it was all for the purpose of my education.

 

II. When Free Will Seizes
It doesn’t matter that my issue with education in Chicago was one of my will and not one of my ability, because I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the difference back then anyway.
Had someone told me back then, as I tell students now, that the primary goal of education is to learn how you learn, it wouldn’t have mattered to me, although I probably would have paid a bit more attention, being a narcissist, had someone pointed out that I was the real subject of the lesson and not the grammar or the math or the history.

The goal of education is to give us skills to cure injustice, to appease conflict and to endure suffering so that we can sustain life-long bonds and protect people entrusted to us and serve people in need. To develop these skills we must learn how to be critical thinkers and careful observers and radical humanitarians.
Try teaching that to me back then.
My problem in school and my problem on the ball field and my problem at the park after dark with my binge friends had a single source: I didn’t know myself.
As a result, I had the wrong idea about what learning was, and I had the wrong idea about what learning does.
My first mistake was thinking that education was something external that I had to reach for and secure with great labor, instead of thinking of education as something internal that I merely had to switch on to activate.
I compounded that mistake by thinking that there was only one way to learn – the way the particular teacher taught, or the way particular classmates thought.

For example, I had the wrong idea that reading was something that was supposed to come easily and quickly to everyone, and that if I did not absorb a story fully on the first take, it was because I was not smart enough to understand it.
I didn’t know that the goal of reading is making interior connections that can be applied in exterior directions. I didn’t know I could take as much time as I needed in order to get the most out of what I was reading.
So I stopped reading.
My second mistake was thinking that education would degrade my creativity and demoralize my spirit by making me swallow alien propaganda.

So rather than feeling impoverished by my illiteracy or feeling ashamed enough by it to change, I was actually proud to be non-educated.
Ironically, this attitude locked out my best chance to figure out who I was on my own, which was the only way I was comfortable doing things.
What I was left with was worse than nothing.
By rejecting the lessons in great literature, I deprived myself encouragement that comes with identifying one’s own problems in others, and I denied myself balance against my own error, so that I actually became more resentful, more isolated and more self-destructive.
Then it happened: my free will seized.
I became a fixed man in a moving world.

But at the point where I should have died I got swept into something I still don’t understand 20 years later in which I emerged still doubting and still troubled and still bereft, but no longer resisting my own conscience.

 

III. The Importance of Original Offense
It was during my recovery that I learned about the original offense.
The original offense is the knowledge that our conscience is already programmed when we first meet it. The original offense is the expectation upon us when we first know our conscience to accept the fact that we are not our own authors.

From the beginning, I knew there was someone else’s handwriting on my deepest inside guide. I knew the handwriting belonged to the author of right and wrong. And I resented it.
What I didn’t know was that it was okay to feel offended.
It’s true of course that we ought to be perfectly confident that the author who has informed our conscience so impeccably with the laws of life must be supremely good and supremely just.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling indignant that the writing is there at all.
After all, it was my own conscience.
It was this indignity that prevented me from listening to my own inner voice. It was this indignity that made my interior reason sound to me like treason.
So during my recovery from alcoholism and during my discovery of faith in unseen things I came to a point of no return concerning my conscience, in which I had to admit that I had no choice.
I could either listen to my conscience and suffer a life of meaning, or I could ignore my conscience and suffer a living death.

While I had survived leading a dead life during my first chance when I was intoxicated by the illusion that I was making free choices, it was no longer possible for me to survive that way once I tasted the real freedom of belief.
And once I surrendered to the occupying author of my conscience, all of the other barriers to my education disappeared.
I admitted for the first time that my best thinking had brought me to ruin. I put my pride aside about what I thought I knew, and I tried to learn.
I began to read. I began to study. I began to listen. I wrote things down I wanted to remember. I discovered an appetite for learning that I had never known before, and it made me feel as young and tough as a teenager.

I was a new man, full of the old man, but with a whole life’s worth of room to grow.
And still there are many things about my own story that I don’t know.

 

IV. Hard Knocks Are Overrated
Every semester I tell my students that the older they get, the more responsible they are for their own education.
They want to tell me about some bad teacher who’s crossed them or some busy circumstance that’s interfered with study or some bad DNA that’s prevented them from being smart students.
I tell them that regardless of what insecurities haunt them and regardless of what unfairness happens to them they are still responsible for knowing everything essential about themselves and everything essential about their world.

It is an offense to some of them for sure, just as it was an offense to me.
But the ideas that I have now about who I am and where I came from and where I am going and why I am here are precisely because I endured what offended me and accepted the fact that there was no way to win by fighting it.
These ideas I have now about my origin and my identity and my destiny and my purpose took a long time to come to me.
I think of the people I wounded in the name of nihilism and the people I abandoned in the name of narcissism and the people I betrayed in the name of free will. Some of them I have been unable to make amends to because they’re out of range.

But it is not necessary to endure the bruises of experience and suffer the violence of self-destructiveness to find authentic ideas to live by. There are bloodless short cuts. Faith is one. Service is another. Education is the mother of both.
Education makes the heart conscious of the suffering of others. Education fills the heart’s holes with soul. Education makes the spirit receptive to grace.
But these are just words on a page.

 

V. The School of Self Education

If you were to ask me exactly what turned me around 20 years ago I might tell you that I went through a conversion. But that would just be a term. I might tell you that I was given a second chance. But that would be a cliché.
The remarkable thing about what happened to me is education knew what I needed to know even though I was convinced that I needed to know nothing from education.
I hope it goes without saying that I am not talking anymore about grammar or math or history.
Education exists for a purpose. There is only so much energy that we have. There is only so much vision that we have. And there are only so many chances that we have.
There is simply not enough of life or sight in any of us to get to the Promised Land without a guide.

So what I had to do as an adult with my education behind me is what many people must do as adults with their education behind them.
I had to go to school all over again.
Just as the body can be taught to do something highly specialized and completely unnecessary to survival such as hitting a round ball with a round bat squarely merely through instruction and repetition, so too the mind be taught to hit deep thought through education.
Just as the heart can be taught unnatural actions such as generosity or patience through the pursuit of friendship, so too the mind can learn complicated truths through the cultivation of education.

This is not to be confused with the continuing education one gets at work, although professional courses that tune up practitioners to the changes in thinking and approach in their fields certainly can achieve some of the same goals as self-education.
Nor is self-education to be confused with everyday observations of experience or everyday adjustments of interactions that are more reaction to outside events than an internal strategy to learn about meaning, even if observation and adjustment are important factors in self-education.
Instead this is about faith that your soul knows where to go.
Follow it.
You do that by letting go of what you don’t know so that education can show you where to grow.