L'Amour said,
"A wanderer I had been through most of my early years, and now that I had my own home, my wandering continued, but among books. No longer could I find most of the books I wanted in libraries. I had to seek them out in foreign or secondhand-book stores, which was a pleasure in itself. When seeking books, one always comes upon unexpected treasures or books on subjects that one has never heard of, or heard mentioned only in passing.
Now I knew what I wished to learn and could direct my education with more intelligence".
Earlier in the book he had written,
"Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
He knows so well the limits of his knowledge and how much lies waiting to be learned".
I was a Social Studies teacher for 29 years, 30 if you include my student teaching. During that entire time I never thought of myself as a particularly good or bad teacher, I was just a teacher and I did the best that I could to teach the subject matter that I was assigned. Where I feel that my expertise was had nothing to do with content, it had to do with teaching young people how to learn. Many of my colleagues had so much more content knowledge that there was no comparison and they were good teachers of content.
Additionally many of my colleagues only knew the world of formal education; they went to school for 12 or 13 years, they went to college for 4 or 5 years, then they became teachers. Some never even worked outside of the education world and yet they wanted to pass themselves off as life experts. That was where I often had trouble with formal education and "educators" with all the answers. They took great pride in the fact that they required students to memorize the periodic table, the theorems of math or the chronological order of Presidents. In all honesty I could have cared less about rote memorization.
I'm not saying that memorization is bad, it is good exercise for the brain and I can still recite things like the scientific method or the classifications of animals that I learned over 50 years ago. What I learned and what I tried to teach however that I felt then and still feel is more important is where to go to get the answers. When I was in school and when I first started teaching it was as simple as teaching students library and research skills. Now there is so much that makes it even easier with technology but you still have to help whet the appetite of people so they want to learn more and this is where I found a quote from L'Amour to reinforce my thoughts on the matter.
"I think the greatest gift anyone can give another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning. Today, one can sit in the comfort of his own home and explore any part of the world or even outer space through books. They are all around us, offering such riches as can scarcely be believed. Also, I might add, having done both, it is better to sit in comfort with a cold drink in hand and read the tale than to actually walk out of the Mohave Desert as I did."
I'm not suggesting that I would rather read about a new place than visit it but I agree with L'Amour that reading can be a way to visit places you may otherwise never have an opportunity to see. In a previous post I spoke of Wonderlust and the importance of instill it and passing it on to others. How do you do that with someone who has always been a non reader and expresses no interest in becoming a reader?
L'Amour states: "Yet for those who have not been readers, my advice is to read what entertains you. Reading is fun. Reading is adventure. It is not important what you read at first, only that you read".
And read I do!
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