Every man’s mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man’s imagination should be touched as often as possible by the great works of imagination; every man ought to push toward the horizons of his intellectual powers all the time. It is impossible to have “had” a liberal education, except in a formal , accidental, immaterial sense. Liberal education ought to end only with life itself. —Robert Maynard Hutchins
The first step to becoming a lifelong learner is to abandon the idea that completing a formal education program means you are now an educated person. You may be more educated when you finish than when you started but a formal education really only lays the foundation for learning how to learn. It’s what follows after finishing a formal education that matters the most.
The second step is to engage in the Great Conversation. The Great Conversation is a term coined by Robert Hutchins that refers to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West in ways that have not characterized any other civilization, no matter how great that civilization’s achievements. (I would posit this spirit is derived from the Logos, and animated by the Incarnation. In other words, I believe the West is unique because the spirit of inquiry inherent in its foundational Greek culture was soon animated by Christianity which subsequently provided a foundation for further conversation about humane thinking. Nevertheless, I digress.)
The Great Conversation is rooted in the liberal arts, a method of learning applied to a pool of knowledge, or as Hutchins refers to it, “a fund of ideas.” The liberal arts assures us there is more to being human than a mere slavish existence. Liberal refers to being liberated. Arts refers to the techne by which we become liberated. Said another way, we can know, if we want to; if we choose to. We can know something substantive about ourselves, about the human experience, and about the cosmos and our place in it.
Practically speaking, the Great Conversation is a spirit of inquiry applied to a series of great works—the best that has been thought and written in the Western tradition—often called the Great Books. Each of the Great Books have in some sense risen up as a contradiction or challenge to a great work that preceded it. Thus, we have something like a two-thousand year conversation that we enter into when we read and discuss these works and their ideas.
One of the interesting things about the Great Books is no matter how well-read one might become in those works, seldom is any one of them ever mastered; and, inevitably, they always lead us to other Great Books. And in this sense, the Great Conversation never ends. And, this how one becomes a lifelong learner, by engaging in the Great Conversation as a way of life.
Leave a Reply