Am I learning yet?

My part time job at 16


When I was a teen, a long, long time ago as they say, ("Hey dad, were there dinasaurs back then?") , my world wasn't all too big. Dad bought 8 acres (3 hectares) when I was 13 and built a house there, a 'gentlemen's farm' as some call it.. This put an indelible stamp on me; more on that another time. But it was in the country, past the suburbs of 1953. My days were mostly filled with full time school, part time work in the summer, and chores at home. With 4 horses, 150 chickens, 4 heifers, 2 geese and 1 turkey there was more than enough to do, plus a vegetable garden of about 1/2 acre and a lawn twice or more that size. My brothers were too young to help much, so I always stayed busy. And at age 18, I had 2 jeeps and snowplows to keep me busy in the winter and (help) pay for tuition. Dad wanted to get me started in business....

Other than riding around with a friend in his car on the weekends (mine wasn't all that much fun) or going fishing or hunting, my days were taken up with the above. I dated very little, and never having had a sister, girls were always a mystery to me. I didn't even know how to talk to them. All I know is that, while girls were very attractive, they were not a part of my regular life. But then, it wasn't exactly a sexually open climate that I lived in, either. Quite the opposite, really... The only 'sex education' I got was from sneaking a look at Playboy when I could. Oh yeah, and the one time my dad tried to talk to my younger brothers about birds and bees in the orchard. What a laugh...

A lot of things hadn't been 'invented' then, let alone things that are aimed at kids, and so it was mainly an adult's world, and living outside the city limited my social contacts to mainly church and school, and I had to get home from school to do the chores, so I seldom took part in school activities or hung around.

That sounds strange to me today, as I still have two kids at home, 12 and 17. What a different world! But then not only the times are different, but also the place.

It was with this background that I met my future wife. My friend had set me up with a 'blind date' and we 'doubled' that first time or two. That first date was awkward, and we just rode around mainly. But I felt comfortable with this girl, and she was pretty, plus my folks approved of her as well. She was, after all, the same religion and background. It just kind of felt familiar and natural. Mind you, this was the first girl I had had more than 2 actual dates with. And I could count the earlier girls on the fingers of one hand. Easily.

I went into the Army Reserves active duty for 6 months at that point; when I got back at age 20, many of my friends were getting married, so this began to influence my world again. As the months went by, more of them married and I could feel a kind of nudge to do the same. I had been dating this girl for some 18 months by this time. And we did marry the following year when I was almost 22.

Such was my preparation for marriage, and such was my knowledge of the world as preparation for adulthood.

Good old days? Maybe. But I was hardly prepared for life and marriage. Looking back, I would say that I knew plenty about my church and beliefs, and a limited social circle, and some academic things perhaps, but little about reality and the world.

After all, 'believe and do as we say' was all that was necessary, plus some hard work.

Was it?

Does education kill curiosity?

" It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." Albert Einstein.

He also said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and "The only real valuable thing is intuition" and ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education" and "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" and - just to keep us humble, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

Two more and then I'll quit: "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen" and "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

Back to the first quote.

I've seen this quote, and others, by Einstein before. I love reading quotes, have lists and lists of them. But reading this one again at Judy's post (foregoing log) got me to thinking.

My mother has said a number of times that when I was small (before school mostly), I was always asking: "Why?". Drove her nuts. And I faintly remember that yet.

I wonder when I stopped asking.

I know that was at a young age already, before 7 I think. I wonder what happened.

It wasn't until many years later, after the 'gift of pain' in my 40's that I started wondering, and began asking, again. Almost 40 years is a long time to go without asking, "Why?"

I think Einstein was right.

The schools I attended were all, academically speaking, very good ones. And they were also Christian schools, all of them, all the way. Even the Christian college I attended is still in the top 20 colleges in the U.S. academically, yet I did not ask 'why?' during that time.

Why?

Now that I'm 65, I'm asking 'Why?' quite often again. Because I want to know.

I'm not the first to say this, but I will say it: Real learning begins AFTER you're out of school. And, for me, the learning began again when I stopped just 'believing' and doing what was expected of me, and began to look around, and began to ask 'Why?" again.

Does 'belief' kill real learning?

Why?

Question Everything

This short essay describes some of my experiences also, although I came from a strict Calvinistic upbringing and lifestyle all the way. American style, which means "black socks" (zwarte kousen) religion, and American political and social myths combined into a weird unreality. Reality, it seemed to me, was warped or denied; my faith and culture had all the answers, so shut up, believe, and go along. Judy doesn't say how old she was when she was freed, but for me it was a process that began in 1981 and has taken more than 20 years to finally come to fruition. I was 41 when that journey began, and it's still going on. Here, then, her essay, which tells part of my experiences.


Question Everything
By Judy Andreas

As a child, I was never encouraged to question authority, in fact, I was never encouraged to question anything. Each morning I would don my uniform of obedience and go to the local public school where teachers fed me from the daily trough of accepted truths. Ours was not to question why; ours was but to file in silently and assume an erect posture on our assigned perches.

I learned the game quickly but had a difficult time playing by the rules.

"Judy will never have higher than a B in CONDUCT," Mrs Lathe told my mother. "She talks too much."

Standing in the corner of the room did nothing for my ego (or my conduct.) It's not that I was afflicted with Oppositional Defiant Disorder or anything so glamorous. Those were the days before ADHD and the parade of trendy media diseases. It's not even that I was a disruptive child. My transgressions rarely exceeded whispering to a neighboring student or slyly passing the "notorious note" while I thought the teacher had her eyes safely focused on her nail file. But, glancing over her bifocals, she pounced on the crumbled paper which had missed the distant desk. "Judy?!" "Go to the back of the class!" And so, in the world of clasped hands and straightly sitting students, I was doomed to wear the Scarlet Letter B.

" It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." Albert Einstein.

As I grew older, though my questions found voice, they rarely found answers. I questioned my parents, I questioned my teachers, I questioned my religion, and, ultimately, I questioned the nature of reality. Nobody in my life seemed to appreciate the teenager with the big eyes ....always looking out at the world and asking "why?" Nobody appreciated the student with the big mouth who could not seem to remember that "children should be seen and not heard."
Tempus fugit and, through a series of predictable steps, I found myself cast in the role of wife and mother. My then husband also had difficulty understanding my "need to know."

"Why are you always searching?" It was my turn to field a question. "Why aren't you content just being a wife and mother?"

I loved being a mother, but there were certain aspects of wifedom (wifedumb?) that were akin to having my most precious part amputated....MY MIND.

My ex was a wonderful human being but was threatened by my intellectual pursuits. He felt, somehow, that they had the potential of destroying our relationship. The end came as he feared, though it was the attempted stifle that dealt the death knell. I could not be silenced. The part of me that, for lack of a better description, I will call my "higher self" stood behind me...pushing me forward, occasionally sideways and then forward once more.

I sought answers between the colorfully bound covers of books. In my early 20's, I fell in love with the writings of Wilhelm Reich and stayed faithful to him until Carl Jung entered my life. I was fascinated with Jung's archetypal world; sometimes referred to as dominants, imagos, mythological or primordial images. I read about the anima and animus, the trickster and, of course, the shadow. Jung felt that if you wanted to understand the jungle, you could not be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. "You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem. " http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/jung.html

And so, I began my personal exploration of inner space. It was only a short trip (no pun intended) into mind altering experiences, which, by the way, included the worlds of metaphysics and mysticism. My explorations led me into the realm of unlimited possibilities and affirmed that "blind acceptance" was the dreaded demon that had possessed my educational journey.
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A quick flip of the calendar and we have jumped forward to the year 2005. But have we really gone forward? As I read my email and listen to the news, I have nothing but questions. I question the cruelty and injustice in the world. I question the presence of a loving Creator and ask how such injustice could even exist. I look at the pictures of burned babies in Iraq and my heart burns with sorrow. The radio warns me about diseases and wars and endless terrorism. The Internet shows me pictures and articles about the plight of the Palestinians. I question how the Jewish people, with their cries of past persecution, can allow this to happen to even one other soul on the planet, no less an entire people. I question how we have created a world of hatred, competition, self absorption and bigotry.

Have I really moved forward? Perhaps not. For as I look out upon this world, I am keenly aware that there is something chillingly familiar about the landscape. I am back in my classroom but now it is populated by adults and Mrs. Lathe is no longer peering over her bifocals. She has learned to torture the students who step out of line. She has learned to imprison the people who have not memorized The New National Educational Manual of Martial Law. She has applied the shampoo of brainwashing to the heads of the obedient.

Questions are quickly becoming an endangered species and many of the students have caught on to the grim reality that questions, at this point in time, can have grave consequences . Grave consequences. But rest assured that they will be even worse if you remain silent.

Copyright 2005: Judy Andreas
Judy Andreas.com

Coming Home

COMING HOME

I suppose I could also call my path "the road less travelled". Whereas my life began under a very prescribed form of following what I was expected to follow and to do as I was told, and to believe what I was told to believe, I experienced what some call "the gift of pain" and my life has since that time been a search for what is knowable, often away from the herd. Some might call that 'a search for truth'. In choosing for this path, I had to leave the 'broad' path of common beliefs and perspective, and often there seemed to be no path at all, and even more, no certainty of 'knowing' that comes with remaing within the 'safety' of the herd. And often that has come at a social price: Being discouraged by others, sometimes jeered, laughed at, or even harshly criticized, and a few times even pushed off or even threatened, especially emotionally, by those close. It seemed my search was some kind of threat to them.

In that process, much of my life has changed and I learned to give myself permission to become who I was and could be, instead of who and what someone else had determined for me. The only regret I have is that I began this journey at age 41 instead of younger. This blog will attempt to log some of that.