Louis Roney: All to the tune of a hickory stick

While the sun blazes away and daytime highs still soar into the 90s, a new season of the mind is upon us. Young people are finishing summer jobs and idle pleasures, and are readying themselves to go back to school. When you ask the average student why he is in high school or college, he may say something to the effect that: “I have to learn how to make a living.”

But, to my mind, preparing to make a living and educating one’s self for all that a human life can demand, have about the same relationship as a promissory airline ticket in the hand, and the reality of exposing eyes and ears, and heart and soul, to the glories of Paris, or Greece, or the Grand Canyon.

A wiser answer: “I’m going to school to learn how to make a life for myself!” That life can be miniscule, with horizons at arm’s length away. Or our horizons can stretch out to an infinity where lie enormous challenges, and the room to pursue them!

I have been asked, “Why did you teach?”

Of course, then I had to ask myself the same question!

My best answer is, “I taught in order to pass on what was taught to me by wise people most of who have long-since passed. What they taught has worked well for me my whole life long. I want to give it to you. I am only passing on to you an age-old tradition. It’s not original with me!”

The uneducated who live in a mini-world need only a vocabulary of a few hundred words to express what’s in their minds. Unlearned people learn easily to deride and despise and deny the existence of treasures that may be out of focus beyond their limited visions.

Unfamiliar does not mean unattainable. Perfection may be out of reach, but excellence is an attainable goal. But just try to tell that to a person who abandoned his education before he found the inner world of understanding and tolerance.

In 1637, Réné Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” More than 300 years later, Jean Paul Sartre said pretty much the same thing, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

If the size of one’s existence is a function of the size of his thinking, then the quality of one’s life is a mélange of the qualities of his thoughts. “The thought is father to the deed.” Old saws can still cut through deadwood.

When our actions emulate what we admire in others – even if we are only “playing a role” – we learn to admire ourselves.

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Leviticus 19:18.

The implication is clear. We cannot love other people if we do not love – that is, esteem – ourselves. But first we must harbor the thought. We must think love. Self-hatred easily evolves into hatred of others. Human happiness is the reflection of love we felt as the little child each of us once was. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” said William Wordsworth.

The child begins life uncorrupted by the blindness of those about him who may be uneducated in mind, heart and soul, those three repositories of all that is worthy in human experience.

George Bernard Shaw, an eagle-eyed critic of Homo sapiens, wrote, “The trouble with youth is that it’s wasted on the young!” Youth is a time for selfishness, in the best sense of that frowned-upon word.

Youth is usually the only time when we can devote ourselves almost solely to ourselves, with very little responsibility to others. The young can afford to think adventurously about the size and quality of the world in which they are destined to spend the rest of their days.

This year I hope once again that students will choose to live in a limitless world peopled by heroes, past and present, in literature, music, drama, painting, sculpture, history, government, science, languages, invention, sports, and, above all, peopled by heroes in the pursuit of human freedom, ingenuity, and man’s humanity to man.

Most of us have to work about 40 hours a week. Workweeks may become even shorter. A week is 168 hours long. If we sleep 8 hours a night, every week we have 72 hours when we are neither working nor sleeping.

Those 72 hours of leisure time are the prize for which lots of people labor and plan all week.

If you think that your spare time is worth little or nothing, consider this fact: innumerable forces are tugging avidly at your precious free time.

Everyone from airlines and resort hotels to bowling alleys and baseball teams – to national parks, cruise ships, your public library, newspapers and magazines, TV sitcoms, bookstores, boat brokers, Broadway shows, rock stars, racetracks, computer games, your local orchestra – all compete to preside over your leisure time.

In our classrooms, students and teachers alike should set themselves on a collision course with the excellent things “out there” in the diverse cafeteria that is “life on earth in the 21st century.”

Quality teachers sell the exhilaration of the “quality life.” Only teachers who expose “easy, cheap compromise” and who urge students to shoot for the best are worthy to call themselves teachers.

The rest are spiritless automatons who mouth dead formulae year after year. Vacation days are long over. Students and teachers are joined in a new adventure: the journey of the mind. May they share a liberating glance into the intellect's limitless universe. May both student and teacher, to paraphrase Descartes, really think, and therefore really exist.

Let students think for and about themselves as evolving forces for the good of all.

Let teachers think empathetically with every young human being who is exploiting a unique opportunity to tailor their life’s definitive horizons.