Lifelong Learner:

To Be Or Not To Be

I used to be want to be a Lifelong Learner when I grew up. Figured I'd  learn something I liked every day until I headed off for Eternal Recess. Naturally, as I got older, I also learned plenty of stuff I didn't like, but I suppose we all do. Consider the above mug shot and think how much fun it was for Nick Nolte to learn never to get arrested for a DUI on a bad hair day.

As it happens, I don't drink and drive, nor do I have much hair, but I'm straying here. Just let me say that I'm no longer sure I want to be an L2, because recently I discovered the origin of the expression. To understand my reticence, you need a bit of history.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States.

Before occupying the White House, Wilson earned a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and entered academia, eventually becoming president of Princeton. (He was also an avowed racist who set back the cause of Civil Rights a generation, which shows that an advanced degree doesn't necessarily make you a better person.) Anyway, Wilson led the United States into World War I. There were 15 million military and civilian casualties in that dustup, and if you read A Farewell to Arms or All Quiet on the Western Front you'll come away convinced the war wasn't much fun. It was often fought in the netherworld of the trenches, where you were nearly as likely to die from a strep infection as you were from a bullet or bayonet.

Today, almost a century later, the United States continues to try and clean up the mess that war made of the Middle East. So imagine how annoyed Americans were at Wilson for getting their loved ones chopped up and why they figured that no matter how educated you are you could still be a certifiable idiot. This anti-intellectual cloudburst had enormous repercussions for public education.

During the 1920s, as scholarly gadfly, Heather Mac Donald, points out, progressive American educators decided that schools no longer had any use "for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math. Instead, [students should] take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time."

Enter William Heard Kilpatrick, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, whom Mac Donald names as "the most influential American educator of the [20th] century." Kilpatrick determined that kids had no use for facts and figures, which only screwed up their ability for "critical thinking." That's what schools should teach, since if you want to be a "lifelong learner" all you need to know is where to look things up.

Ultimately, I concluded that this line of non-thinking qualified Kilpatrick for entry into M-HOF (photo below) and it led me to reject the L2 ideology.

Moron Hall of Fame

Here's how I reached my conclusion. First, I imagined myself a childhood victim of Kilpatrick's edu-trash. And there I am one morning, decades later, with a friend, at Starbucks in Stuyvesant Plaza. As we're drinking coffee outside and watching the cars chase pedestrians from the crosswalk, my friend mentions that his family has just returned from Kansas where they did a little tornado-watching.

I want to discuss my friend's trip with him. Ask if he saw Dorothy or Toto or the Wicked Witch of the West. Except I have no idea if Kansas is near Florida or Oregon. What do I do? Excuse myself, dash through the crosswalk, hop in my car, drive to the library or home to Road Runner, thumb through an atlas or surf the Web, and then drive back to Starbucks. My friend has to go to work. If he waits around for me, he'll lose his job. Then he won't be my friend any more. Suppose I was at a dinner party or a business lunch or a funeral. Whenever people engage you in conversation you can't keep running to the library or, let's say, ask a mortician if he has an Internet connection in the embalming room. Pretty soon no one will invite you out. You'll have to stay home. That would give you more opportunity for critical thinking, but all you'd have to think about is why no one invites you anywhere and the answer is because you're an empty-headed ding dong who can't stay in one place for more than two minutes.

Next thing you know some clown will buy you this button for your birthday:

See what I mean?

And so you won't catch me using the L2 word. Not now. Not ever.

I like learning too much, and there are so many things to learn.