We Can Still Get Some Things Right

Resisting Urges and Learning Stuff

CS Lewis starts his essay entitled “Learning in War Time,” with the following words:

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.”

While the value proposition of higher ed is being analyzed for its ROI or its use of money for athletics and research, at its core, it is a place where people gather to learn. The pragmatism of our current culture minimizes learning and we have reduced the process of learning to information sharing with the rise of people getting their news from social media outlets. The irony that platforms built off people themselves being the product (Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, isn’t worth much if people stopped posting) are also news sources is hard to watch. But I digress.

My interest is in how we are formed in a mobile world and so higher ed is caught in an ongoing discussion about how we navigate a world that is simultaneously less politically democratic than a generation ago and more accessible to the average worker though hand-held devices. Travel is meant to open up the world and experiential learning has an increasingly valuable role to play in the ‘pursuit of learning,’ because personal experience is difficult to forget.

In experiential learning theory, Kolb et al make the point that an experience leads to a reflection that can lead to a learned principle which can conclude in a changed behavior or new action. In other words, lived experience sets change in motion if reflected on long enough. This is why separating learning from lived experience is often a mistake. In our mobile world, students really do have the potential to learn through experiences within their university years, but most choose to minimize the types of experience in favor of the familiar which is both the path of least resistance as well as the one that is most crowded.

CS Lewis, in a different essay entitled “Why I am not a Pacifist,” that is also in the collection known as The Weight of Glory, outlines his case for the formation of moral judgments. Lewis writes: “We have seen that every moral judgment involves facts, intuition, and reasoning, and, if we are wise enough to be humble, it will involve some regard for authority as well,” (72-73). In short, moral judgments involve other people and impact other people so it involves being within a system where facts and reasoning from those facts can be worked out within a supportive structure.

Lewis concludes with a rather amazing phrase: “For we have learned now that though the world is slow to forgive, it is quick to forget,” (90).

We happen to live in a time period where the world is both slow to forgive and slow to forget (thanks to our newly found digital ecosystem). In our mobile world, we can make comments about people we’ve never seen who are from countries we’ve never been about issues we’ve only had passed on to us from friends. In other words, we see people forming opinions all the time with limited experience within a world that doesn’t want to forgive or forget mistakes.

Now, let’s see if we can tie these thoughts together.

Universities create an environment that encourages the pursuit of learning. One vivid and transformative way of learning involves experience that is reflected upon long enough to result in a change of mind or habit or heart. The challenge to this is that we now live in a world that is not making judgments based always on facts and reason and that this same world is slow to forgive and slow to forget, so be careful what you say. You see, then, that as we work this out, we are learning to be limited in our experience because we really do know that some people will never forgive or forget the chances we took, the words we said, the swings and the misses.

This could be downright depressing, but Anne Lamott offers hope in her book Bird by Bird. Lamott writes:

“I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong.

I honestly think that in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we…shut down.,” (99).

I see and read about the fear of war and of violence. I see and read about the desire for a university degree to be both affordable and meaningful. I see and read about the changes in research funding, athletic salaries, and I just know that we can’t scold our way into a new world. Because wanting to change something involves a humble awe that any of us can be part of said change. It’s rather awe-inspiring to see so much within our reach. My concern, though, is that the steady diet that ignores reverence in favor of ‘never forgiving’ and ‘never forgetting,’ may cause many to…. shut down.

And that would be a mistake on both sides. It would be a mistake to foster a system where reverence goes missing and it would be a mistake to overload our circuits with such a lack of charity that we struggle to be present long enough to get some things right. And we really do have the capacity to get some things right instead of the giving in to the….shut down.