Does going to school do us any good?

            Of course, knowing how to read and do simple arithmetic helps us immensely to get through the day. Being able to figure percentage and recognize the difference between a virus and a bacteria prevents a stressful waste of time and money, another boon to the smooth running of our life. Rudimentary acquaintance with history and cultural icons enriches our leisure. The rules of baseball, the story of Snow White, what sushi is made of—such tidbits allow us to engage in conversation without appearing as if we have just landed from another planet.

            These items come under the heading of Education—and the more the better—but my subject is Learning.

            My question then, is, Does our time spent in school help us learn to live better?

            My answer is, No.

            In an episode of the defunct TV series Joan of Arcadia, Joan and her friends and family were, individually and together, looking for answers. No, not exactly: they were looking for Answers—to a tragic incident at the high school and to the continuing turmoil of their lives. But in the scant hour punctuated regularly by commercial breaks, there were unabashedly no answers, only questions. In the closing minutes, hints were tossed about that it might be important to ask the right questions, but, even so, what we end up with is not answers but . . . Mystery.

            Such wisdom—and on Friday night television.

            Sitting in a classroom for approximately twelve years doesn’t get us anywhere near the vicinity of this insight. The one thing we all are sure to learn, good students and poor students, if we learn nothing else, is that every question has an answer and there is one right answer to the question—and it's at the back of the teacher's edition of the textbook. Even those who work hard at preventing the system from stuffing them with Education go out into the world inoculated with school’s most important lesson: there are answers, Right Answers.

            Yes, I was once a willing cog in such a system and, in repudiation of those twenty-five years, I have come to believe that schooling actually derails us from living well: it sets us on a lifelong quest for an impossible grail.

            In my early twenties, I thought I couldn’t possibly consider marriage if I couldn't fill in the blanks for the test question, What is love? My culture provided plenty of answers in the form of movie-screen love and greeting card love. I knew from rumor, reading, and experience about destructive “love.”  In philosophy courses I learned about agape (fellowship) and eros (eroticism). Puppy love and lust rounded out the list.

            I was confused; I had no Answer. Lucky for me, I got married anyway; I became a parent. I didn’t recognize my wisdom when I stopped asking the question and just experienced here and there, now and then, something that fell into an amorphous category labeled “love.” But I continued to believe the Answer lurked out there because I saw people around me foundering in the same struggle.

            When you kick around in it long enough, life appears less as a problem to be solved and more as a mystery to be lived. Life is not a test on which we regurgitate the course syllabus—if only there were a syllabus. Questions pile up; answers dissolve in the whoosh of time. 

            Come with me just for a moment to the high country of the Sierra. I'm standing on a granite slope, a gray slab streaked with pink and gold—earthy tones, not wrapping paper colors—strewn with boulders from the size of fists to the size of houses. Behind me lies the ragged hem of the trail that led me out of the forest of pebbly-trunked lodgepole pines. In front of me, stone and sky, unmarked, mute.

            Then I see it, a “duck”— a small pyramid of shards, three flattish pieces of rock carefully balanced by someone who had once passed this way. My eyes wrest this construction out of the jumbled landscape, much as a camera pulls the scene in its viewfinder into focus, and I head toward it. Scanning ahead I see another duck, an islet of intention in a sea of randomness. In a few minutes I have crossed the lithic wilderness and I am returned to the beaten earth, stamped with the imprimatur of boot prints. My heart has stopped pounding.

            Such is the syllabus, a gestalt of intention that we extract from chaos. We learn to read the landscape, we begin to know where to look for ducks and to have the patience to watch them materialize without our heart leaping into our throat. We haven’t figured out where we are going or why we are on this trail, but the air is fresh, clean with the scent of pine and earth. We have never seen sky so blue, or blue so blue. We hear only the wind in the highest branches of the trees. And perhaps a faint quacking.