I hear more and more from my students that they don’t have enough time.

This is a real shame. It’s one thing for lack of time to blight the lives of independent adults. But it’s another thing for college students to feel so pressured that they cannot let their education unfold. Speed kills learning.

Part of the reason for the sense of decreasing time in college is the delusion that learning is information transfer. It’s taken for granted that we need more and more information just to stay upright in a world awash with new data every hour.

People sell executive summaries of new books immediately on publication, so that people don’t actually have to read them in order to suck up the main points. Blinkist predigests books for you and even delivers them in audio formats so you don’t have to read at all!

College students have grown up with pitiless technological attempts to deliver more bits of information into the minds of students more efficiently.

But not everything is information. A well-educated person also needs to be able to speculate, to ruminate, and to imagine. Developing these abilities takes time, but even more important, it takes leisure. We’re killing our future by not giving students the time they need for these abilities to grow and strengthen.

Reading long and complex books slowly trains us to wait while thoughts and feelings settle in. Nothing is more crucial to developing insight than waiting for ideas to root. A thought is like a seed. Once rooted, it can be tended occasionally, but it must grow in its own time. We must wait. Discussing books slowly helps: it’s like watering the growing seed.

A college education that doesn’t rush ideas, that doesn’t demand harried mastery of information, that doesn’t rush through material just to “cover” it, coming just as young people start to move into adulthood, can teach them the need for—and the power of—incubation in the life of the mind.

The demand for instant results not only kills the spontaneous growth of ideas. It also depletes the imagination, which is itself like a plant in many ways. It gains strength from waiting and watching, letting the mind’s eye wander over the budding ideas, watching them grow. A strong imagination is the mind’s fertilizer: it produces faster and more robust growth than could ever be achieved by strain, effort, and artificial deadlines.
Without time to wait and watch it withers and its powers never get strong.

A good college education exercises the imagination in every way possible. It introduces the mind to mathematical objects in order to teach it to see what transcends the physical. It provides time to mull over stories, novels, and plays in order to awaken the inner movie-goer’s spontaneous generation of imaginary characters. It provides time for creative writing as well, and for art of all kinds, both imitative and productive, in order to teach people how to turn an inner vision into an object that all can see.

A good education does not just build up thinkers, it builds up creators.

So, it’s a shame if the college experience evanesces in busyness. It may be the only serious leisure for which modern life leaves some time. And if students fritter away that time hectically amassing information, how will they learn to nurture their souls in the truly trying years of the rest of their lives.

A good college experience, with the leisure to learn how to grow internally, is a lifetime possession.

Fast is shallow. Slow is deep.

Anyone who is attracted to liberal learning has heard the never-ending argument against it. What good will it do you where it really matters—in the wallet?

If you’re still a student, this argument has been bearing down on you most of your life. Since the 2008 crash, liberal education has taken it on the chin. It’s too expensive and doesn’t repay the investment. It doesn’t give students skills needed in the job-market.

If you’re a responsible adult, similar arguments claim that liberal learning is a waste of your time. After all, time is money. So why would you spend time learning stuff that has no bearing on making more money? If you’re going to spend time or money learning anything, make it something that plumps up the bottom line, like new training courses in your industry.

The main argument in these complaints is financial. This befits the prevailing economic paradigm that dominates our thinking.

And that is why these arguments are so wrong. They are saturated with the false belief that there is such a thing as homo economicus—the monetized human being. The economic paradigm is myopic and one-sided. It does not, and cannot, apply to everything, and especially not to learning, which is an unlimited good, not subject to the law of supply and demand.

Yet those who argue against liberal learning seem to think that the most important aspect of learning has to do with job training. Job training has nothing whatsoever to do with liberal learning. Any course of study that prepares people for a specific job also narrows them, molds them to fit a specific task. This has the effect of diminishing individual freedom. The fate of people trained for specific jobs is determined by employers, not by themselves.

Nothing could be farther from the goals of liberal learning. The purpose of liberal learning is to awaken our power to reimagine both ourselves and our conditions. It tries to show us the possibilities for remaking ourselves and the world around us. By attending to the possibilities for change, we may someday escape from subservience to external conditions.

Job training unleavened by liberal learning keeps people in chains. Society does not really need more industrious drones, laboring away their lives in predetermined niches. We are moving toward a world in which most of the drone jobs will be done by drones—robots, that is. How are we going to solve the problem of all those who will be out of work because all they know how to do is the sort of labor that a machine can do better? Asking that question points to what society really needs: imaginative creators who can reinvent the world.

The modern economic paradigm cannot grapple with this problem because it focuses far too much on scarcity. But scarcity is something of an illusion. It is a one-sided view of reality that ends up distorting our perceptions. Of course, it is obvious that some resources are limited. But that is hardly the entire story. The counterbalancing element—a fact just as indisputable as scarcity—is creativity. One creative genius can generate new economic value together with a brand new stream of wealth. Think of the electric light, air travel, personal computing.

One might think that economics should pay more attention to the optimistic reality that value can be created instead of the pessimistic reality that scarcity exists. But for some reason, the field prefers pessimism to optimism, spending most its time figuring out how to extract short-term profits from a long-term losing game. Economics is not called the dismal science for nothing.

Liberal learning takes a much, much wider view of reality than the economic paradigm. It understands the role played by scarcity in the woes of humanity, but it is not fettered by scarcity. It sees that scarcity hinders us, but it also sees that the disease of scarcity has an antidote—creativity. Where there is lack, it can be overcome by diligent, determined creativity.

The focus on scarcity also causes the economic paradigm to distort the truth about liberal learning. The economic paradigm sees liberal learning through the lens of “survival.” In reality, liberal learning is about something much more valuable than mere survival. It’s about life mastery. It’s about taking charge of your entire life—not just your finances.

Getting a remunerative job is not taking charge of your life. Taking charge aims at something much more comprehensive. It includes plans for family, career, finances, community, service, and many other aspects of life. All of these aspects need to be weighed in relation to one another and to your vision of a life worth living.

To adopt the means and the end of economics—namely, job training and financial survival—as you begin to build your life is a tragic error for two reasons. First, because it delivers you into a state of bondage from which you may never be able to extricate yourself. Second, because it narrows your perspective just as you are starting out, limiting your imagination to the set of choices that appeal to the economic paradigm.

And since the economic paradigm distorts reality, your adoption of it distorts the truth about the choices that are really available. This in turn impedes your ability to weigh all the elements that ought to go into your idea of a life worth living.

Unless you know at least something about all the important aspects of life—not just the financial aspects—and unless you understand that your task in mastering life is to judge all these aspects from the highest vantage point you can attain, you may never master your life.

Life mastery is the aim of liberal learning. Impossible as it is to know everything, it is necessary to know enough about everything that is important, so that you can master life rather than be mastered by it.

Ever since I posted the last entry, I’ve been receiving emails with questions about serious conversation. Let me try to explain how the concept grows out of the difficulties faced by determined, resolute readers.

The dilemma of the resolute reader

I am a reader. Always have been, as far back as my memories go.

Even before I could read, I loved books—their feel, their smell, their typefaces, their bindings.

I joined the faculty at a small college devoted to reading and studying the greatest books ever written so I could spend most of my time with books.

Over the years, I’ve met thousands of people who share the thirst for reading.

What is it that drives us? Is it a desire for knowledge? For information? For entertainment? For self-improvement? For advice?

We may be looking for any of these things at various times.

But I believe the desire that keeps us poring over books is something deeper, more profound, closer to our hearts. It’s a longing for wisdom.

Real readers—dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate bookworms who are attracted to the most demanding books—are seeking wisdom.

We open a book hoping that somewhere in its pages the author may have dropped a nugget of wisdom, a chunk of insight so hard that the passage of time cannot erode it.

As I see it, a reader is a seeker.

You know who you are. You probably enjoyed school more than any of your friends or acquaintances because there you could read and discuss books. You probably stayed in school as long as you could. Maybe you even became an academic.

But when you started working for a living you discovered that the world isn’t much interested in the search for wisdom that animates genuine readers.

You discovered that most members of your own family, as much as they love you, aren’t interested in the matters you want to discuss. And even if they are, the pressures of life usually interfere with such discussions.

Nearly all the serious readers I know have the same complaint: they hardly know even one other serious reader they can talk to. This makes their reading solitary. What is worse, it hinders the search for wisdom.

Why? Because what we are likely to get out of a book is determined by what attracts our attention. And our attention is conditioned by our personal experiences, our predilections, and our prejudices.

When we read profound books alone, we probably miss most of what is there to see. “Reading alone,” I once heard someone say, “is as bad as drinking alone.”

And this unsatisfying situation not only harms readers, it harms society as well. Society’s lack of interest in the search for wisdom sidelines the very people who are most eager to dive deeply into the nature of things, who are most inclined to discover hidden connections and underlying truths. How many groundbreaking discoveries never happened because society’s seekers don’t have the time to read seriously and contemplate deeply?

No one is winning here. Readers can’t fulfill their desire to seek out wisdom. And society cannot benefit from the insights that successful readers might contribute.

A world made for readers

In my experience, the most helpful thing for serious readers who want to get the most out of their reading is—serious conversation.

By serious conversation I don’t mean ponderous, humorless conversation among effete intellectuals and self-important poseurs.

I mean sustained, lively dialogue about a single book among several readers dedicated to searching for wisdom.

This kind of dialogue overcomes the limitations of solitary reading while retaining all of its value.

In serious conversation, we can share the personal concerns that arise during solitary reading. And we can get help from others. And, even more important, we can discover new ideas that would never have occurred to us on our own.

Serious conversation turbocharges reading. It multiplies our efforts.

If the world were made for readers, opportunities for serious conversation would be everywhere. In the world as it is, they are hardly anywhere.

You have probably joined book clubs and attended book conferences. But their penchant for novelty, popularity, and faddishness make them too superficial for dedicated seekers. You may have tried academic courses or their technological spin-offs, internet courses. Good ones can be very interesting.

But they are all based on the lecture model of information transfer: the teacher has the knowledge and tries to impart to learners by talking at an audience.

I→YOU teaching is not serious conversation. Many things can be learned in this way, but wisdom is not one of them. The search for wisdom requires active participation in reading and conversing, repeated engagement with the same issues, and assistance from like-minded seekers.

Modernity does not support this kind of interaction.

Modernity loves gigantic scale. But the scale of serious conversation has to be small. Somewhere between twelve and eighteen participants is the best size for serious conversation if everyone is to be heard equally.

Modernity loves speed. But serious conversation proceeds slowly. The nuggets don’t reveal themselves quickly.

Modernity loves debate. But serious conversation requires cooperative contributions from all participants.

Modernity loves efficiency. But serious conversation relies on serendipity, indirectness, and unforeseen developments to generate new connections.

All this explains why it is so hard to find serious conversation in the world around us. The modern world is just not suited to serious readers.

I think it’s long past time that we dedicated readers shaped our own reader’s world.

What do you think?

If all this resonates with you, if serious reading is your passion, and if you want to get the most out of the greatest books ever written, what do you think we should do to create a reader’s world that will support our search for wisdom?

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, because I think we need a reader’s world—and now, before people like us become an endangered species.

“I’m too busy working and caring for my family to go back to school, so I’ve been keeping my mind alive by reading great books on my own,” a man named Robert was telling me recently at a book-signing event. “I’ve been following a reading schedule I found online, and I’ve replaced some of my TV-watching-time with reading-time. It’s just as relaxing, and much more inspiring.”

Robert, like many others, has discovered that access to humanity’s greatest minds has been made easy by the growth of the internet. In olden times, when I was growing up, say, you had to actually go somewhere to get access to a great book—to a library, or a bookstore, or a school. Now you can call up almost any great book at will on your web browser. And most of them are free!

On top of that, you can also find guidance on what to read, entire curricula to follow, book guides, and expert analyses. Here’s just a random sample of such resources:

Sites for finding books:

• http://www.anova.org
• http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html
• http://www.bartleby.com

Sites for reading lists and curricula:

• http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan
• https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings
• https://thinkingasleverage.wordpress.com/book-lists/mortimer-adlers-reading-list/

If becoming familiar with the greatest writings and artworks of humankind appeals to you, nothing is stopping you from doing so—provided you have an internet connection. Just get a list, download some books, and start reading. That’s the way Robert got started. The accessibility of the material has never been greater.

But, as I mentioned in the previous post, the availability of the material is something else. What do I mean by “availability”?

Robert got into the matter as we continued talking. “I’ve been doing the reading for a few years now,” he said, “and I enjoy it immensely. But I feel that I’m not getting as much out of it as I could be. I’ve started listening to some of the Great Courses on the books or the authors, and those are very interesting as well. Yet I know that something is missing.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because some of the books engage me more than others. When that happens, I can’t stop thinking about the issues raised, and I often have insights that are new and inspiring. But other books don’t engage me as much. I read them, and it’s good knowing what’s in them, but I pass on without the book making much of an impact on me. Yet I know that these are all great books. So I must be missing something.”

Robert’s concern is pretty common. To understand it, we have to see that it’s not a matter of the readings engaging us; it’s about us engaging the readings.

The reason why some of the great books grab us more forcefully than others is that we are already inclined toward the issues raised by those particular books. When we come to them, we are already predisposed to see those issues as important and engaging. We arrive at these predispositions by upbringing, education, and life experience. Books that happen to deal with our predisposed interests are easier for us to engage with than books that don’t.

Or another way to put it is this: books that appeal to our predispositions are more available to us than books that don’t. And this is what I mean when I say that a liberal education is more accessible than ever, but not widely available.

The question is, How do we make more great books available to ourselves? If we were limited to engaging only the works that already appeal to our predispositions, we would, like Robert, come to understand that we were missing a great deal.

There is a difference between a well-read person and an educated one. If you read all the greatest works but only engage with those that appeal to your predispositions, you will end up knowing a lot but not expanding your horizons much—which is the point of education. It is likely that life will bring you experiences that will make some of the books more available to you than when you first read them. When that happens, you will want to read those again, because they have now become available to you.

But it would be a shame if your education had to be left up to chance in this way. How can we open ourselves up to works that aren’t yet available to us, to books that don’t already appeal to our predispositions?

The answer is simple, and it is the foundation of all genuine education, that is, learning directed toward expanding our intellectual, ethical, and practical horizons. The books become more accessible to us through serious conversation with others who also want to expand their horizons.

We can become interested in matters that don’t currently interest us by hearing the interests and concerns of others and realizing that we too have similar concerns, even if our lives haven’t yet brought those concerns to the forefront of our awareness.

If we want to get the most out of the great books, if we really want to educate ourselves, we bring the experiences of our reading out in the open through serious conversation.

More about this in the next post.

In the previous post, we said that specialized disciplines are not as freeing as liberal learning, which aims at training the imagination first and foremost. Each discipline’s special methods isolate it somewhat from other disciplines. They create a safe and brightly illuminated island where those who accept the current paradigm of thinking can do their work without fear of making errors.

But a dark, unexplored sea of ignorance surrounds the island, a sea on which the discipline has not sailed. When someone spots an object out there in the shadows, it becomes a predicament for the residents. How can they get from their well-understood island to the dimly perceived distant object? The intervening darkness could be full of hidden dangers.

All specialized disciplines approach this problem in the same way. They start a reclamation project. They use the currently accepted methods of their specialty to build out and fill in sea-walls until the boundaries of the island enclosed the distant object.

Occasionally, in the course of the project, the inhabitants discover that illumination on the original island was not as bright as they had first imagined. They discover that modifying some of their earlier assumptions turns up the brightness and the clarity of their thinking. This is the way specialized disciplines like to make progress—little by little, only when forced to by the need to reclaim territory from the sea of ignorance.

Obviously, there are disadvantages to this approach. Preferring bright light and safety, it sticks with its assumptions unless forced to reconsider them. It tries to translate every predicament it meets into its own well understood language, rather than suppose that the unknown object might speak a different language worth learning. And it all but eliminates serendipity, working on the new object with familiar tools and surrounding it with pre-planned outworks.

There is another way of approaching an unknown object, a way that is bolder and takes more risks. One can put to sea and head toward it like an explorer, in ships propelled by imagination. Imagination refuses to prefer the relative brightness and safety of the island to the potential treasures lying offshore in the darkness. It feels free to treat the unknown object as it will, not as precedent dictates.

Is there an opportunity to learn a new language? Let’s get started, says imagination. Is there a chance that assumptions need to be overturned? Let’s get started, it says. Is there a chance that something can be learned by creating stories or dialogues or music or artworks about the new object? Let’s get started, it says. Imagination gets started, and then it improvises its path. It can even abandon the original object for a more promising one that may appear on the journey.

Imagination has this freedom because it is not limited by predetermined ways of connecting things. Specialized disciplines, on the contrary, are constrained by their methods. They have agreed-upon rules about what counts as an object, what counts as evidence, what counts as valid reasoning. Imagination, on the other hand, can always find new metaphors to refill the sails.

It is the freedom inherent in imagination that makes it superior to the reclamation project. Imagination can choose to build a reclamation project—even to temporarily take up residence on a brightly illuminated island—without becoming chained to the island. But island dwellers can never make a journey of exploration without leaving their island behind.

None of this implies that specialists cannot undertake journeys of discovery. It only means that when they do so they leave the brightly illuminated island at least for a time. The brilliant discoveries of a Newton, a Darwin, an Einstein are the results of imagination striking out into the darkness and finding there a new source of illumination.

The power of imagination to find new suns also makes it prior to all specialized knowledge. Imagination, it turns out, is the founder of disciplines. It is only from the universe of all connections that a discipline can select its particular connections. In other words, the special disciplines, each and every one, were established by the power of imagination surveying the universe of connections and choosing the particular connections that would apply in each specialty.

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Since a well-trained imagination is the prerequisite for the sort of learning that leads to new discoveries, the question has always been, How do you train up such an imagination effectively? And the answer, as we have said before, is genuine liberal education.

The world has never needed liberal education more. All its dilemmas cry out for well trained imaginative minds to launch risky journeys of discovery. And yet the environment of higher education has never been more inhospitable to liberal education for young people, and the possibilities for ongoing liberal education among adults are almost non-existent.

And the irony is that the materials on which genuine liberal education can be based have never been more easily available to more people at any time in human history.

In the next post, we will take up the problem of how to tackle genuine liberal learning in these times of maximal accessibility and minimal availability.

In the previous post, we said that imagination is trained by studying metaphor. What is metaphor, and how does it train the imagination?

You probably remember the high-school definition of metaphor: an extended simile. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Metaphor, taken in its widest application, refers to all connections of any kind, all links among objects or thoughts, no matter how close or distant they seem upon first consideration.

The study of metaphor, the domain of connections, is crucial in education, because most of our thinking works through comparison. And comparison depends on following the connections among thing while holding them side by side in the mind’s eye. The more we study metaphor, the more we trace the paths of the innumerable relations that among the innumerable items in existence, the better we get at connections, even among the most dissimilar things.

Since everything we think and everything we do depends on our grasp of the similarities and differences among things, the better we are at are seeing connections the more control we have of the whole world around us. This is possible because metaphor transcends all specialized jobs, all divisions of thought into specialized disciplines. Metaphor is at home in all walks of life.

Mathematical proportions are metaphors, as are equations, which are proportions reduced to the single relation of identity. Science too proceeds by metaphor, and all the greatest scientists are metaphor experts, sniffing out connections among the most diverse things and devising ways to show whether the connections they suspect truly exist. And, of course, metaphor is just as important in all the so-called humanistic disciplines, where we continually search for the connections that make sense in history, politics, philosophy, literature, and the fine arts.

The universality of metaphor makes liberal education liberating. It allows us to fly from idea to idea, from thing to thing, freely and without hindrance. With an imagination invigorated by this freedom, we can repeatedly leave the confines of our current lives. We are free to remake our lives using whatever connections we can find or forge in the world around us. As I. A. Richards once wrote, command of metaphor is command of life. (I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric [London: Oxford University Press, 1936], 95.)

An imagination well trained by the study of metaphor, with the ability to follow its inclinations wherever they lead, frees the mind and the heart to take command of life.That is what liberal education is all about.And this a freedom that transcends all the particular knowledges converted by all the different academic specialties—as important and as fascinating as they may be.

More on this in the next post.