The meaning of education
As someone who has somewhat radical views on the state of education, (we pulled out our children from regular school and started our own community learning center), I was looking for a perspective of what it means not going to regular school when I started reading Educated by Tara Westover. In the book Tara shares her journey of growing up on a farm and not stepping into a classroom until she was 17, to completing a doctorate from Cambridge University on Intellectual History.
Tara’s parents were highly religious and skeptical of government and the modern way of life. They were also very poor and lived in very difficult conditions. I will not go into the details of the journey (you should read the book), but there were circumstances that made Tara escape the life her parents had chosen for her and explore the world of knowledge. It is clear that she was exceptionally bright and also was lucky to find the right mentors who identified her talent and helped her excel in academics.
Through the book Tara recalls how little she knew about things growing up and how dramatic it all seemed to her when she was exposed to academic history. Her world view was shaped very much by her parents and siblings and her exposure to religious teaching. Once she left home, she was reminded how wrong they had been all along, and how they had manipulated written history to suit their own way of life. Her parents had downplayed African American slavery, the holocaust and feminism to her as it showed their community and religion in a poor light. The journey for her was not only of gaining knowledge, but also becoming her own person with her own independent set of ideas and personality.
As she became more and more independent, her family started distancing themselves from her. The distance grew bigger when Tara became financially independent from them and started to question their dogmatic religious beliefs. Torn between family and her new found understanding of the world, she had begun to doubt her own sanity. This journey is what she says is the meaning of education. When you have the ability to think for yourself and question what you have held true all your life. For Tara this happened when she met different people, traveled to different places and read history and philosophy.
To get into a prestigious university like Cambridge is rare, and to come from such a big disadvantage is rarer. The fact that Tara was able to make this journey, makes me wonder why so few of us are able to make this happen? Personally, have I made that journey yet? How many of my beliefs and biases have been shaped by my family’s understanding and convenience of truth? How many have I questioned?
All my life I have lived and grown up with people who were very much like me. Even when I lived away for three years in another country, I was still not challenged enough to think differently. In the last decade or so, two things have really transformed me. First is marriage and parenting. Living and understanding a person who grew up very differently for me has helped me become empathetic to people who are not like me (probably for the very first time). Parenting has give me the opportunity to look at life from the very beginning and has given me insights into my own childhood, and increased my empathy and patience even more.
The second trigger has been entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has been a struggle which has forced me to question my every belief and behaviour. Having not found the right aspirational model, I have questioned every assumption about how and why companies and products are created and managed. It has been very disorienting and has left me with deep questions about my abilities and understanding of the world.
In this entire journey I have been helped by the great books that I have read, and now videos that I have watched. Books on parenting and education by John Holt, Daniel Greenberg, Sal Khan, Amy Chua and others have helped me understand how modern education is designed to produce pliant humans and fails our inner creativity. My understanding of entrepreneurship has been shaped by reading hours of HackerNews, and learning from stories of successful entrepreneurs and thinkers like Paul Graham, Jason Fried, Steve Blank, Steve Jobs, Chris Anderson, Linus Torvalds and others. My understanding of society and economy has been shaped by very eclectic writers like Naomi Klein, Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Pavan Varma, Ram Guha, Howard Zinn, Yuval Noah Harari, Arundhati Roy and hours of reading my favorite weekly The Economist. As someone who loves fiction, I have binged on both science and literary fiction, with favorites being Murakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Corey, Urusula Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin
Watching the videos series on morality and ethics by Michael Sandel has been transformative in many ways. It is a recording of a class taken at Harvard University and I would wholeheartedly recommend this to everyone. I believe our biggest challenge and aspiration as humans is the ability to act morally. Unlike animals we have the ability to understand and evaluate complex situations and act on basis of not only our emotions but also our set of values. The process of education for me is to shape these emotions in a way that is consistent with the values I believe in, to experience true internal and external harmony.
If I have to distill the process of education and becoming yourself, it boils down to two things.
1. Seek knowledge
2. Seek hard challenges
I think just seeking knowledge is not enough because we never test our knowledge unless we seek a challenge. Whether I succeed or fail is immaterial, the journey itself has given me the highest amount of satisfaction and fulfillment.
