I really want to speak of several things together: reading, questioning, investigating, and from these and many other things, learn.
It is at once a characteristic of humans that we can learn and that in many ways we fail to learn. There is a commonly quoted saying about ‘those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ These words were spoken by Winston Churchill, in a speech in the British House of Commons in 1948, but the original formulation comes from the philosopher George Santayana, in his book The Life of Reason (1905).
They were right, and events since then show how little we have learned from a history of wars and exploitation.
Still, as a species we have indeed learned so much. To begin with, I am so grateful for those who taught me to read. I have long believed that if we teach someone to read we have made available to them an immense world of ideas, possibilities, visions of beauty and grace.
I first came to this realisation one evening on a crowded street in Chennai, India, nearly fifty years ago. A group of us were seated at an outdoor café table and I became aware of a moderately loud, droning sound, more or less behind us. I was in fact distracted by the sound and I looked to see an old man seated on the footpath, facing the café window, with a newspaper spread in front of him, as he read it aloud. He could not read without vocalising the words, but that did not matter to him at all. He was wonderfully absorbed in the joy of reading.
Reading is a fundamental resource for life and it is a tragedy that in a time when so much is available to us, in print and digitally, that so many people never read. Scrolling has replaced reading, while some never did read books. I wrote a blog about a scholar whose house was famously so full of books it was difficult even to get in. But that same fellow said to Mervyn Himbury, his student at Oxford, that we need always to be prepared to put a book down when there is someone in need of our presence and help. He had really learned something, that person!
https://www.tobefrank.com.au/reflections-on-text-and-context/a-lover-of-books-and-people/
In my childhood home, education was perhaps the primary value. For so many in the post-war generations, education was the way to ‘get ahead’ and that is definitely what our parents wished for us. In their case it was about opportunities they did not have. Neither of my parents had progressed beyond Grade 6 of primary school. But my father in particular was a reader, all his life. If there were words or ideas he did not understand he would look them up in a dictionary or encyclopedia. From his life and example, I came to realise the crucial distinction between schooling and education. Dad had very little schooling, but in his own simple ways he was continually learning. Through the many opportunities I have had for an education, more than gaining a degree or qualification I have hoped always to learn.
Learning requires attention and respect for those who have gone before us: learning from history. It also requires questioning and investigation. A very popular television show in our youth featured a polymath scientist, Julius Sumner Miller (1909 – 1987), who was constantly questioning. His show was called, Why is it so? He invited us to think: What do we know? How do we know? How can we explain this?
That educational exercise is one I have always hoped to practice: inviting others to question and learn. For me it is inspired by a famous story-analogy set down by Plato in his Republic. Plato described the life of humans as being within a cave, where the people can see shadows or shapes, on the walls of the cave. The wise will see that these are indeed not real, they are at most reflections of reality. For Plato, the things of this world are not the ultimate realities. A small number of people will gradually move towards the mouth of the cave, to the source of light, at least for a time. They may have the vision of reality, things as they really are. For them, the great challenge is how to live in the cave, with the knowledge of what is real and true.
Indeed, it is a great challenge to live with one’s learning: it can divide us from others, and all too easily can become a source of pride or superiority. It ought to bring us to humility, to realise how little we know, and how often we fail to learn.
But more than that, I think. The challenge is to live with and to assist others, who may not have any idea that the shadows are just that, not the deep and wonderful things one might see and grasp from the light beyond.
I do not think learning is an end in itself, nor is it given to us for ourselves alone. It is a gift and a calling, a resource to contribute and share. It is a habit of life, to be lived in and into.
What that means is itself something worthy of deep reflection and commitment: to learn, to value learning, and to go on learning. In reality we learn not only from our achievements, travel, education, and so on, but also from our struggles and failures. This is perhaps the most important thing about that saying, with which we began—the challenge to learn from history—our own and others’. This involves our next habit, the capacity for self-reflection.