Educating a man

A short note on Thomas Jefferson and Robert Heinlein

Dear S,

Being educated is a lot like having muscles. If you’re in great shape you don’t have to tell anybody you go to the gym. And if you’re well educated you don’t have to tell anybody at a party about your degree.

An education is something you can see, and smell, and taste. It imparts a natural, easy, unfeigned confidence; it chews up and digests new information well; it shows itself in banter, in taste, in wit and anecdotes — you can be playful and others will take you seriously.

A declaration of education, on the other hand, is usually a sign of insecurity. Best case scenario, it means you’re talking to somebody about your field of expertise and you’re not so sure they believe you. Most times it means you're either looking for a job from a stranger, or you were educated beyond your intelligence. It’s the last-ditch effort for the man who’s either in a hurry to impress somebody, or the man whose education failed him.

Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia with some friends at a bar. Over a pint or two he wrote the following about an education, with a few changes I made for outdated spelling and punctuation and some too-obscure vocabulary.

Education generates habits of work, order and the love of virtue; and controls, by the force of habit, any innate ambiguities and irregularities in our moral organization. We should be far, too, from the discouraging persuasion, that man is fixed, by the law of his nature, at a given point: that his improvement is a fantasy, and that the hope of rendering ourselves wiser, happier or better than our forefathers were, is specious. As well might it be urged that the wild & uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour & bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better: we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable both in kind & degree.

Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious & perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth; and it cannot be but that each generation succeeding to the knowledge acquired by all those who preceded it, adding to it their own acquisitions & discoveries, and handing the mass down for successive & constant accumulation, must advance the knowledge & well-being of mankind: not infinitely, as some have said, but indefinitely, and to a term which no one can fix or foresee.

This is all very idealistic, of course: a dream full of generalities and metaphors without any particular plan or direction. But he didn’t leave the blueprint up to chance, and added that a good school would teach

to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.

To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express & preserve his ideas, his contracts & accounts in writing.

To improve by reading, his morals and faculties.

To understand his duties to his neighbours, & country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either.

To know his rights; to exercise with order & justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the trust of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence with candor & judgment.

And, in general, to observe with intelligence & faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

Further down the list we find that every man should learn how to teach kids and other citizens what their rights and duties are; that he should know agriculture, the basic sciences, the (so-called) classics, and foreign languages like French and German and Spanish — especially since this last one was spoken by our neighbors.

Place this picture of competence and manliness in contrast to the graduates today and of course you have to shout your degree: you can end four, eight, twelve years in any university and you’ll only have a job to show for it. If you can even get a job with a degree in black or gender studies. If you even deserve one.

The knowledge of how to manage yourself and others, the synthesizing of multiple (practical) fields, the feeling that you don’t just fit in here, but can make it anywhere and any time in the world — all this is swept under the rug. We have many engineers, and doctors, and preachers, and lawyers. We have much fewer actual men.

Heinlein once put it,

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

No idle dream, in his case. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1929, worked as an engineer in the Navy for five years, went to school for mathematics and physics, quit all that, and became one of the greatest, deepest, manliest writers of science fiction ever. Pick up Starship Troopers and you’re not just treated to a space war about bugs. You’re peeking inside the soul of a real man*.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Shakespeare says in The Taming of the Shrew,

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

This is a fact known by every intelligent man ever since the invention of the schoomarm. The best things don’t just come out of you when you’re having fun — such as a man who really loves his business, or invention, or brewing, or making love. The best things are also most likely to get into you. We are most interesting when we’re most interested. The soul walls itself off against the boring, the tedious, the shop-worn, the superfluous. We absorb the world best when we enjoy it. Love is the driving force of all genius.

The moment a man finishes what other people want him to learn and starts learning what he wants to learn, he begins really learning — and many times, he learns what he was born for. All the best educations are self-educations. All the great geniuses did it themselves.

What I haven’t mentioned above is that one essential element of an education — and perhaps the element, aside from raw curiosity and imagination, is intelligence. Thus half the world — maybe 75% of it — can be indoctrinated. They can parrot teachers for years and get a fancy degree to prove it. But true education via fun belongs to the minority.

*If you’re thinking Starship Troopers? The movie from the 90’s about fighting space bugs? then consider this single passage of many — a deep, meaty exchange between a teacher and his students.

“Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet. “These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value—the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives—and illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.”

He goes on, a little later,

“If you can’t listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether ‘value’ is a relative, or an absolute?”

I had been listening; I just didn’t see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn’t read that day’s assignment. “An absolute,” I answered, guessing.

“Wrong,” he said coldly. “‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.” (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard “market value” called a “fiction”—snort in disgust, probably.)

“This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier . . . and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?”

“Uh, I suppose it would.”

“No dodging, please. You have the prize—here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it—or don’t you?”

I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids—a typical sneer of those who haven’t got it—and now this farce. I ripped it off and chucked it at him. Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”

“You know darn well I placed fourth!”

“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money—which is true—just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.”

This book may be the manliest, deepest piece of fiction I’ve ever read: a masterpiece on society, discipline, warfare, citizenship, and loyalty that ranks with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged**, and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath — a book that should be bought in hardcover and handed to every fourteen year-old boy and discussed for fun.

I said a long time ago that the most effective philosophy books are novels. Somewhere I read Heidegger say that a perfect philosophy book would be written in jokes. Heinlein was dead serious here, but the common principle still stands. Like the teachings of Jesus, the deep stuff was meant to be put into fiction — sharp jabs of light interspersed between moments of action. All philosophy is supposed to be kinetic.

**I classed Starship Troopers with the likes of Atlas Shrugged, but philosophically, it’s the antithesis. Atlas Shrugged is a novel about individualism: the idea of respecting and being true to yourself. Starship Troopers is a novel about duty: the value in giving yourself for a team. And the truth is that both of them are true in their time. There can’t be any good society, in the end, without people valuing the whole more than themselves. But who do you owe this to? In the end, if you’re being sensible, only to people who are worth it. A man who pledges himself to people who won’t pledge themselves to him is a fool. Any martyrdom for the unworthy is a horrible waste.

But here lies a great irony. The only society that pledges itself to you is a society where somebody first decided to pledge himself to it. Thus duty — like selfishness — is contagious. And we never know which is more predominant in a society until we put ourselves on the line for it. When a conflict starts, the first martyrs, like the first traitors, are often a surprise. Any act of self-sacrifice is primarily an act of faith.