There really was a set of encyclopedias behind the bar at Jimmy's

Two interesting articles juxtaposed. Jian Xueqin is discussing the nature of learning (and the role of creativity and emotion in learning) and how and whether the best Chinese schools achieve a desired outcome:

In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks outlines the four-step learning process that teaches students to be creative: knowledge acquisition (research), internalization (familiarity with material), self-questioning and examination (review and discussion), and the ordering and mastery of this knowledge (thesis formulation and essay writing).

However, this isn’t a linear process, Brooks points out, which means that the learner ‘(surfs) in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together – first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then wilfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product.’

‘The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step,’ David Brooks continues. ‘By the end, (the learner) was seeing the world around him in a new way.’

But what permits our brains to turn a chaotic sea of random facts and knowledge into an island of calm understanding? Believe it or not, it’s our emotions that permit us ultimately to become creative thinkers. In his book The Accidental Mind, the neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how emotions organize our memories:

‘In our lives, we have a lot of experiences and many of these we will remember until we die. We have many mechanisms for determining which experiences are stored (where were you on 9/11?) and which are discarded (what did you have for dinner exactly 1 month ago?). Some memories will fade with time and some will be distorted by generalization (can you distinctly remember your seventeenth haircut?). We need a signal to say, “This is an important memory. Write this down and underline it.” That signal is emotion. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningful…These are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for.’

What this means is that memories are ultimately emotional experiences, and that effectively learning must involve the learner emotionally. The very best US schools are seen as such because they inspire their students to be curious, interested, and excited; China’s very best schools gain their reputation by doing the opposite.

Meanwhile Joseph Bast, head of the Heartland Instute, a think tank, describes his own less than orthodox educational path.

During my first year at U of C, I fell head-over-heels in love with the Great Books. The late Professor Roger Weiss was chairman of the undergraduate "Political Order and Change" sequence and adopted me and a bunch of other freshmen. I did great academically, took an extra course in the third quarter (economics), got a 3.8 GPA out of 4.0, and then made a fateful decision, to “take a year off to read all the background readings that the professors had recommended.” I got a job as a groundskeeper on campus, then switched to janitorial work when a permanent (union) position opened up there. I spent the best year of my life reading Das Capital and all sorts of other fascinating books on the lawn outside Regenstein Library. That summer I bought a used 60-volume Great Books of Western Civilization from an older couple in Hyde Park and it's been a constant companion ever since.

The following fall, I met with my guidance counselor to re-enroll, and was told (to my shock and surprise) that having "dropped out," I lost my scholarships. From that point forward, I would have to work full-time and go to school part-time. I didn't mind. I worked as a janitor in Regenstein Library, one of the world's great research libraries, and even better, I was assigned to work in the Special Collections department, where 200-year-old books were mine for the browsing. I starting taking two courses and kept working full-time. I especially liked courses in philosophy and the history of social thought . . . Spinoza, Hobbes, the German sociologist Georg Simmel, Scottish Enlightenment, Utilitarianism, etc.

. . .

For the next six months I worked part-time for the newly created Heartland Institute while taking my usual two college courses. Then it was summer break. To graduate, I had one course left to take . . . an economics course . . . and an "incomplete" to finish in Russian Civilization III, which just required submitting a paper. I never did take that course, and the professor lost the paper that I foolishly slid under his office door and somehow neglected to make a copy of. Heartland soon became a 60-hour-a-week obsession, as it remains to this day. So today am still degree-less, despite having spent nearly nine years on campus, eight of them taking courses.

Looking back, I think I got the greatest education available in America during the 1970s and 1980s. It was at times a total intellectual immersion, so intense that I remember walking into a telephone pole while debating with myself the differences in how Kant, Hegel, and Adam Smith defined human nature. The professors were amazing, the classes small, and there was no hint of political correctness. There really was a set of encyclopedias behind the bar at Jimmy's, to settle arguments in the smokiest bar and grill in the world.