At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew – and grew – and grew – until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, talking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything…from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, “Right, eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you’ll get a real education.”
One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candour, “Of course you can’t eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for.”
She spoke the truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but the route and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.
But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.
You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill the vacuum. This he wasn’t doing.
He couldn’t. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how could he put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?
Mental reflection is much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
He never reached the mountain. After the third he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he has the physical strength but that physical strength was not enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but though he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too… He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the top of the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain so infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his physical strength, could take.
The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no properties, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind.
…But this second University, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, this setting, the location at which conditions have been made favourable for the real church to exist.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
They are sustained by relationships that have lost all meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just the structure, the system demands it and no on is willing to take the on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic thoughts that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
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