Ta-Nehisi Coates has some interesting thoughts about what he would say to a group of inner-city black kids about education and their futures. This resonated with me:

What I have come to believe is that children are more than what their circumstance put upon them. So my goal is to get kids to own their education. I don’t think I can hector them into doing this. I don’t think I can shame them into doing it. I do think that might be able to affect some sort of internal motivation. So I try to get them to see that every subject they study has the potential to open up a universe. I really mean this.

I went to the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2008, and I still was, very much, a product of my ‘hood. I could not believe what I was seeing. There was a guy next to me who had been old friends with Peter Jennings. He was retired. He had tales about taking Peter Jennings’ boat out sailing. He talked about how he’d spent the day up at the Continental Divide with his dog. He loved his life. His only trouble was that he couldn’t convince his wife to retire.

Negro, I didn’t even know what the Continental Divide was. And I remember thinking, “People actually live like this. Like, we’re doing this now?” And then I remember thinking, “I want to live like that.” By which I meant, I wanted to see things. If this was one world far from mine, there must be other worlds. And I really wanted to see them.

I recall sitting in my seventh-grade French class repeating over and over “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.” Why was I learning French? Who did I know that spoke French? Where is France? Do they even really talk like this? Well, yeah, they kinda do. I figured that out at 37. And now I find myself clutching flashcards, repeating “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.” This summer, I am going to live with my family in Paris for eight weeks and study the language. I had no idea that education could make that possible. If I had been more serious about education, the opportunity would have come a lot sooner.

I didn’t come from a background like TNC’s, and my own path was different from his, but this still sounds familiar. I have had moments like his at the Aspen Ideas Festival, when I was amazed that a kid from a small Southern town could be seeing and doing such things. It wasn’t remotely a “how cool am I?!” thing; it was rather a sense of astonished gratitude that the world contained such possibilities for someone like me. A lot of things go into opening those doors, but the essential element is education. Well, education, but also curiosity. TNC continues:

One problem with being from highly segregated communities (as most black kids are) is that you tend to have less exposure to the world. I had more exposure then virtually any of my friends, and that still wasn’t much. When you don’t have much exposure to the world the options you see for yourself tend to be limited–you can’t really dream about that which you don’t know exists. I would argue that the exposure granted by education is a potent antidote to the kind of provincialism that you must necessarily see in segregated communities. So my argument to black twelve year-old boy isn’t that he should stop dreaming of being a rapper or a ball player, but that he should understand that that isn’t the end of their possibilities. And one way to see more of what it is possible is education.

This is an important point, and not just for black kids growing up in all, or mostly, black worlds. It’s true for all of us. If the only thing you see of the world is what’s around you, and what’s presented to you in popular culture, you are living in self-imposed segregation. It’s part of the human condition, I guess, to denigrate curiosity and the curious. Don’t study those things, because you might not be like us. The fear that education will lead to alienation is perennial, and, let’s be honest, realistic. But what else is there? I would not say that to indulge that curiosity is an unqualified good, but to deny and suppress it is — as you would by refusing to kindle it within yourself — is to kill something human inside oneself. Or to have it killed by one’s community, as an act of self-protection.

For me, the curiosity combined with education is valuable not so much for expanding one’s vocational horizons, but for deepening one’s philosophical understanding — and offering possible ways out of despair. Here’s a passage from Paul Elie’s wonderful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a biography of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. It concerns an early Percy essay:

Rotation is better than alienation for another reason. The act of rotation, in which we plunge into the unknown and see what awaits us, is similar to the act of reading, in which we sit in a room and suspensefully turn the pages. The reader of Huckleberry Finn, in a sense, becomes Huckleberry Finn. “Reading about Huck going down the river or Tenente Frederic Henry escaping from the carabinieri in A Farewell to Arms is somewhat like going down the river and escaping,” Percy explains. “It is by virtue of the fact that rotation is the quest for the news, as the new, the reposing of all hope in what may lie around the bend, a mode of experiencing which is much the same in the reading as in the experiencing.”

In Kierkegaard, the rotation method is a way of escaping oneself, of escaping everydayness. But it is ultimately a dead end. In The Moviegoer, Percy writes:

A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. For example, taking one’s first trip to Taxaco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be.

The rotation method is a dead end insofar as it promises deliverance from the boredom and despair of everydayness by promising something new and exciting around the corner. I don’t think, though, that we should sell it short. For the curious and alert person, the world is filled with mystery and potential, and you really don’t know whether you will meet a stranger who will impart wisdom that will change your life — not by distracting you from your malaise, but actually by helping you deal with it constructively.

Then again, it can be very pleasant to experience these rotations, because they can offer moments of insight and illumination. It’s hard for me to think of a walk more satisfying than a stroll alone across the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the autumn — a walk I made many times last fall. The pleasure of its beauty — architectural, arboreal — is obvious, but for me, the deepest pleasure was this thought: Here I am a stranger among these French people, entering into their everydayness, and they don’t know who I am, that I am not one of them, and I am free to observe without being observed, and to enjoy their everydayness without having to assume the burdens of it.

To me, Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, and my favorite place to visit, but I could not live there for long. Once upon a time I could have, but not now; the condition of being a stranger in the long term is not as bearable to me as it once was. But in doses, it offers balance and relief. (Contrast this with the way walking across the Luxembourg Gardens made TNC feel: trapped and frightened, because he was a stranger. )

I’m getting far afield from my original point, which was simply this: education offers ways out of yourself and your predicament that you could not have imagined on your own. It offers, but does not guarantee. There is always the risk that it will offer the simulation of wisdom, of insight, but in fact make you stupider and more blind. But we all start out stupid and blind, right? So really, there’s not much to lose by giving oneself over to learning, and much to gain.

One of the stock mythological figures from my childhood was the Intellectual (in this case, a real person in our community) who used big words and talked about big ideas, but who was in truth a coward and a fool — and this was clear to most people who knew him. The problem with this was that this man’s example led others to think that everyone who used big words and talked about big ideas was a fraud. They themselves were unaware of their own predicament, a condition that was not the same as the nutty Intellectual’s — but was still a predicament. They too were in a kind of despair, from which education and curiosity might have offered them a way out.

UPDATE:  On re-reading this, it seems disjointed and pointless. I apologize, but I’ll not take it down. I started it before I went to the doctor this afternoon — more tests to figure out why I can’t shake this mono — and finished it when I got home two and a half hours later. I seem to have lost my train of thought in the interim. I’m so tired of being tired, but mostly, I’m just tired.