Education is an amble - Austin Kleon

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.”
—Peter Gray

One of the things I love about Lydia Davis’s advice to writers in her collection Essays One is that she is explicit that the writer’s education should be mostly self-directed.

Here are points 2 and 3 in full:

2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques…. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.

This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.

3. Be mostly self-taught.

There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.

I love those verbs: following your interests, pursuing them, trusting that they will lead you somewhere.

Ambling along your own path… even if it’s deep into an unknown woods…

A page from chapter 7 of *Keep Going*, in which I make the case for reading old books and stealing old stuff.

“I find the annual celebration of contemporary writing, the Xmas lists of 2019 books, quite offensive,” said Lucy Ellmann, author of the prize-winning Ducks, Newburyport, in a recent interview. “It seems so arrogant. These lists suggest that the most relevant books must be the ones most recently published. That’s daft.”

In fact, Ellmann takes things to the extreme and says she only reads books before World War II:

Some time ago I pretty much decided to read only books written before the atom bomb was dropped, when everything changed for all life on Earth. The industrial revolution’s bad enough, but nuclear weapons really are party-poopers.

I don’t stick strictly to this policy, but I often find it more rewarding to read what people thought about, and what they did with literature, before we were reduced by war and capitalism to mere monetary units, bomb fodder and password generators. And before the natural world became a depository for plastics and nuclear waste.

Anger and alienation have resulted, and they’re fine subjects, but there are times when you’d like to remember some of the higher points in the history of civilisation as well, and the natural world before we learned to view it all as tainted. The intense humour, innocence, sexiness and play of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for instance – could this have been written after Hiroshima? Could Gargantua and Pantagruel? Don Quixote? Emma? I don’t see how. Thanks to the offences of patriarchy, a lot of the fun has gone out of being human, and I like books that look at life in less constricted ways.

This idea of stealing from the deep past is one of my favorites, but Lydia Davis is a bit less extreme in her reading advice (from Essays):

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

I was disappointed to discover this year when putting together my year-end book list that the only two books I read published before WWII were Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) and the Japanese Ghost Stories of Lafcadio Hearn, who died in 1901. (Thoreau’s journals end in the year 1861, but it feels like cheating to include them, since I read pretty much read them on a loop.)

I’ve threatened for years to read nothing but books 150 years old or older, but, like other reading restrictions, it goes against my “Read at whim!” beliefs. Still, I want to spend a little more time in the past next year.

In case you’d like to beef up your own reading list, here’s a list of old stuff recommended to me from Twitter followers a few years back: