I've been thinking a lot this week about education. As with any topic that swirls around long enough in my mind, it comes from an amalgamation of sources. This week, it's a combination of the disparate blowback on both the Barbie movie (from fragile conservative dudes on the Internet) and on Oppenheimer, and the fact that I have just finished reading Tara Westover's remarkable memoir, Educated. Also contributing is the fact that I’m in the middle of preparing my own PhD application, and the last is that I’ve had a lot of time to think about all of the above since I’ve been in bed with the flu literally all week with very little else to do but sleep and ponder. The latter point is what caused the delay on this week’s writing and for that, I hope you’ll forgive me.
But all of these things also reminded me of a speech about what it means to be an educated person that I earnestly credit with changing my life and my way of thinking. It's one that I have never forgotten, and one that I continue to listen to and to draw inspiration from today – more than fifteen years after I first heard it. And that's where I'd like to begin this week.
This is Water
First, I may as well get this out of the way: David Foster Wallace was a brilliant and troubled man. After his death by suicide, there were disturbing allegations of assault and threatening from his ex-partner contributing to an already complicated legacy. I adore some of his writing (“Consider the Lobster”, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”), intensely dislike some of it (I have thoughts on Infinite Jest). This is not an argument about separating the art from the artist, as that's a topic for another day and one that requires a lot more space than I am able to give it today.
It is Foster Wallace's commencement speech, given to graduating seniors at Kenyon College and later published into a very thin volume, that is his most memorable and important work, for me personally. Called This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life, it's an exploration of what it truly means to be an educated person. Unsurprisingly, it explores the idea that the greatest gift a good and rigorous education isn't the education itself – the things you learned – but the ability TO learn, to think critically, to look at the world and everything in it, decide what has meaning for you and to structure your life accordingly.
So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.”
If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.
But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
The entire speech is excellent, and I absolutely encourage you to read or listen to the entire thing in its entirety if you get the chance – you can do so here. But if you want a fun, Cliffs Notes version – this video gets to the heart of it nicely.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Reading this speech and hearing it for the first time was a revelatory experience to me as a young university student. I had always been a good student and continued to study hard and get good grades in university – but university education tested me in terms of world experience and critical thinking. I learned three incredibly important things that have continued to serve me well in life:
1. It is up to you to continue to educate yourself about the world. Unlike in grade school, no one will tell you what to learn, or what matters most. You have to decide that for yourself.
2. The only way to decide for yourself what that is, is to learn as much as possible about what is unknown and uncomfortable. Challenge your long-held ideas, explore other perspectives, dig beyond the surface to the root of an issue. There is always more there than you originally thought. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” as F Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
3. Trust your intellect while also being open to new ideas. To me, the mark of a truly intelligent person is the conviction to put forward their beliefs based on what they know AND to amend them if necessary when presented with new, conflicting verified information. You would be amazed how many people have trouble doing the latter. Ego is a hell of a drug.
From Mormon Fundamentalism to Cambridge
The concept of what education IS fundamentally is rarely explored better than in Tara Westover's beautiful memoir, aptly titled, Educated.
Westover grew up off the grid in a fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho with a mentally ill father, a mother with a serious brain injury and a physically and emotionally abusive older brother – among many other siblings. She had no birth certificate and no ID of any kind until she was nine. She was never formally educated and her homeschooling consisted mainly of bible reading with whatever dated textbooks were left around the house. She knew virtually no math, no history and only limited grammar, though she was taught to read.
After her closest brother left the family home to pursue his education (eventually obtaining a PhD of his own), Tara eventually followed at the age of 16 when her father and brother became more violent and controlling. She taught herself enough math to pass her ACT exam and get into Brigham Young University, which, because it's a Mormon university, has a very lenient policy towards homeschooled people – essentially if you can pass your ACT, you can go.
Tara Westover went on to graduate from Brigham Young, secure a Bill Gates scholarship to attend Cambridge and complete an MPhil in Intellectual History and then completed a PhD in the same subject at Cambridge’s Trinity College with a brief sojourn at Harvard. It's a remarkable story of one woman's education – but it's not only about what she learned in school. It goes hand-in-hand with Wallace’s ideas – of the true gift of an education being the freedom it gives you to define your own meaning. For Westover, it’s hard-won freedom.
Hear her speak with the Economist below – and pick up the memoir if you like what you hear.
Bits and Bobs of the Week
Reading: The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb. A super-interesting account of the Norwegian and British combined sabotage that helped win the war for the allies.
Watching: Tár. I adore Cate Blanchett and she was fucking excellent in this. I had heard before watching that the character was so real that many believed it was based on an actual person and after seeing this… I get it. Excellent watch.
Listening to: “The Fall of Civilisations” podcast. Anyone who knows me, knows I am a gigantic ancient civilisations nerd. I inhale docos about them. I love reading about them. I cannot stress how excellent this podcast is. This dude makes history come alive and each episode, even though most are around the 1.5 - 2 hour mark, they fly by. Incredible stuff.
That’s all for this week. Happy Sunday all.
Love,