The Self-Education of Pat

A few years ago I had a running debate with one of my students about the nature of education. He was a pragmatist. That is, he felt education must serve some practical purpose. It must immediately gain you something otherwise it was worthless. I, on the other hand, felt that education was a more internally-motivated pursuit. You undertake an education to become more than you are now. I understand both points of view, though I subscribe predominantly to the latter.

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Around the same time one of my mentors was discussing how he went about educating himself on some topic of interest to him. He got a book on the topic and read it. Then he got copies of all the books referenced by that book and read them. Then he got copies of all the books referenced by all of those books and read them. And so on... While this seems obsessive, and perhaps even obsessive-compulsive - it was certainly an effective method - and as my sister-in-law (a pediatric neurologist) has told me, "not all obsessive-compulsion is bad."

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Lately I have been listening to books on tape by Louis Lamour. Lamour was largely self-educated and his characters were often self-educated. Lamour advocated beginning a self-education by obtaining a load of essentially the cheapest books you can find and reading them compulsively and obsessively. Lamour records reading 25 books one year while waiting in lines, riding trains, sitting at diners, etc... Steven King says in one of his essays (he's a better essayist than horror writer) that he reads roughly 80 books per year.

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I don't know if I'll get 80 books per year, but I intend to begin the Self-Education of Pat. Project Gutenberg has plenty of perfectly good books for free, and I'll be reading them and thinking about them and responding to them in this blog. If anyone wants to jump in and discuss them with me, then bring it!