Preface

The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.

____ Ashley Montagu

 

Richer than kings indeed!  In the world of ideas we can all find riches far more enjoyable and far longer lasting than any pleasures money can buy.  The joys of vibrant thought can never be lost. Continuous, self-directed learning is the greatest means we have to navigate our way through life.

 More and more we hear the term "lifelong learning" used in connection with the kind of learning required to earn a living, but this misses the point.  What I've discovered is really quite simple: knowledge sought critically and passionately, for its own sake, gives purpose and meaning to living.  This seems like common sense, except it is not common in our society to relate well to others or to really know what you want to do with your life. Those who are searching for satisfaction tend to dabble with self-help material in bits and pieces without ever fully embracing the idea that they are seeing to their own education.  The few who wholeheartedly buy into taking charge of their own self-education find that the process profoundly changes their expectations.

Unfortunately, the negative aspects of traditional education keep many people from ever considering that quality of life hinges on continuous learning. We see countless examples of people who graduate from college more confused than when they began. They are often terribly disappointed to discover they don't seem at all suited for a career in their major area of study. They've allowed themselves to be molded into a shape that doesn't fit them because they haven't learned to think for themselves.  Worse, people trained in rigid scientific disciplines for their professional lives use no such criteria in their personal lives, blindly following the first guru that comes along with a preposterous story to tell.

When we fail to take charge of our education, we fail to take charge of our lives. The result is that we give away our power by letting others decide our fate.  Self-directed inquiry, the process of taking charge of your own education, is an empowering experience.  It is the lifeblood of democracy, the key to controlling your life, and a means to living your life to its fullest.[2]  Education has as much to do with how well we succeed in our personal lives as it does with the satisfaction and rewards we get from work. And, as you will see, self-education helps us to define which projects are worthy of the term work.  Our capacity for education is rooted in our ability to develop reasoning skills, which is what makes us unique as human beings.  Quite simply, the practice of learning is the process of becoming more human.  Learning is growth, and growth is a way of experiencing quality of life.  Dropping out of learning is equivalent to dropping out of life.

Beyond the American Dream aims to demonstrate that we humans are unique contradictions: we are overconfident, yet we can be easily discouraged.  Without thinking, we will adopt a social standard of measurement--no matter how bizarre--and use it as a yardstick to measure ourselves and others. We are self-deceptive and easily prejudiced, yet we’re capable of giving up our lives for a stranger without a moment's hesitation. We confuse knowledge and perception.  Many of us are too easily fooled by our culture into believing that thinking is for others.  As a result, we allow ourselves to miss the greatest part of living. Within these pages I hope to inspire you to reexamine the whole purpose of education. Doing so can be pivotal in your search for fulfillment, just as it was for me.  I am more convinced than ever that education for the sake of understanding life is one of the most liberating activities that adults can engage in.

I was past 40 when I discovered what I really wanted to do for a living.  Yet, had I known at 25 what I know today, I could easily have figured it out then.  If the schools I attended had focused on helping me discover my strengths at age 10, I could have had an even earlier head start.  But all that is hindsight.  Raised in a racist community, I became a police officer at the age of 23.  Racism among my fellow officers was not the exception, it was the norm.  Not until I was in my thirties did I choose to begin my own self-education, and it changed my life completely. I now know that if I hadn't started questioning what I saw and heard, and hadn't chosen to figure out the answers for myself, I would have cheated myself out of the best life has to offer.

     Lately I've come to realize that if you can't occasionally make people angry, you probably don't have much to say.  This book, like others I've published, is heavily biased and highly opinionated in favor of the ideas I've assimilated through my own education.  Though it is not my intention to offend, rare will be the reader who is not annoyed or even outraged by something written here. You might find the book infuriating.  At the very least I hope you find it provocative.  Some of the ideas I posit are counter-intuitive, some are slippery, others threaten tradition.  My purpose is not to solicit agreement, but to create situations where meaningful reflection is the only escape and critical thinking the only alternative. Meaningful reflection requires you to use your own experience and observations to consider and to thoroughly examine any issue.  Critical thinking means you must place your inquiry outside or beyond your own interest and be willing to test assumptions or ask any question.

In the spirit of Franz Kafka, who once said, "If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?"  I invite you to stick with me through this text.  Regardless of whether you agree with my observations or not, I promise you alarm, illumination, inspiration, and your money's worth of material worthy of reflection. This book has a dark side and a bright side.  How much of each you find will be up to you.

Beyond the American Dream is not a "how to" book; it is a "why to."  More than enough books today promise much and deliver little.  They fill page after page with useless lists and numbered steps so generalized that they have little to do with real-life situations.  In finding the power that drives self-education, how-to is not nearly as important as the simple desire to know.  A strong sense of purpose will naturally produce its own how-to's. This book is not intended as a recipe for good living, but as a smorgasbord of intellective morsels so arranged as to create a craving for more--in full appreciation of the fact that purpose inspires method.

In the preface to Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes offers a warning about the use of maxims and quotations from other sources, concerned that an author could stultify the reader with amazement and obscure the lessons yielded by actual living experience.  Cervantes’ protagonist Don Quixote, himself driven mad from over-influence by the literature of chivalry, tilts his lance at windmills, mistaking them for giant monsters.  As the novel progresses, Don Quixote becomes a tragic figure, due, in part, to his society’s refusal to accept any deviance from accepted norms of behavior.  The story is a profound representation of both cultural and individual self-awareness.

My own works, including this one, make liberal use of quotations from authors whose words have added meaning to my personal search for knowledge. I offer them to you here as veins in a gold mine. Your own choices will lead you to the motherlode: when a quotation strikes a nerve, you will know where to begin your own search. Some of the quotations I have selected as important to the theme of this book convey a sexist bias in tone though not in intent.  I hope readers will not be offended by them.  Sympathetic as I am to the assertion that the pervasive usage of he to stand for humankind has contributed in cumulative effect to diminish the power and status of women, I have nonetheless found it necessary to respect the words of thinkers from earlier times. 

     Education in the fullest sense--education, that is, to live, work, and play in a global economic society--increasingly depends upon a radical awareness of one’s being in the world, an awareness that comes from learning beyond our respective cultures and even calls for occasionally tilting at windmills.  The gist of all serious study in disciplines of human interest, we find, is that life is not what it appears to be; true knowledge is often deeply hidden from the surface of life.  Clearly, book learning by itself is not sufficient, but if you fail to develop your own thirst for knowledge, culture will overwhelm your efforts.  The record of history is very clear on this point.

     To realize that we as individuals have a choice about how to live our lives--a real choice, independent of what our peers think of our actions--comes as something of a shock because examples occur so rarely. Don Quixote may have been a fool par excellence, but many scholars believe he demonstrated greater character than his one-dimensional countrymen.  I offer you the quotations in this work as part of an educational dialog, not to amaze or impress you, but to serve as the lances of those who’ve had courage enough to joust at the absurdities of popular culture.  Fortunately, everything worth knowing is free for the learning, if you have the desire to learn.

The purpose of Beyond the American Dream is to urge you to question some of your most cherished opinions, using the process that worked for me.  I am certain you'll feel better for having done so.  When you take charge of your education, you take charge of your life, and you shape your own American Dream.  The counterbalance of personal freedom is responsibility.  Self-education can decrease your dependence upon authority, allowing you to develop more confidence in your own judgment.  This, in turn, can inspire you to take active responsibility in addressing the problems faced by our society.  In practice, then, learning becomes the greatest act of self-determination, the ultimate act of freedom.  It is central if we are to move beyond the American Dream and live lives far richer than kings.