Keats: Imagining what we already know

It might have been such a day as this was, clear blue, sunny, a hint of color in the leaves, warm with Autumnal promises, that Dad reminded me of, as he referred to it, a line in Keats, "... that learning, awakening to the truth, is a matter of imagining what we already know." I was walking in my neighborhood, at a leisurely pace, up from Sheridan Circle, up to the Spanish Steps, and back along the quiet street here.

He amplified his point. Keats' point was that there already is an understanding in the reader, something much like knowledge. The educating voice just has to bring something out of obscurity, out of where things are not so clearly thought of, bring it to life so that we can see it all well enough to understand it, if I may roughly paraphrase him. He continued. Someone like the Buddha is more or less born, or reborn, with an understanding, a conception of everything there is in the world, everything from the Big Bang, chemistry, mathematics, how to build an atom bomb (Dad may have thrown that out there for hyperbole), everything, in short, that there is to be known about the world and even beyond it out to dimensions beyond what we all see. Buddha seemed to know, he suggested in some way, knew it all like a dream, or to, in fact, be just a great dream, the great dream that it all is.

So, there are, amongst many ramifications of such a philosophy, if you will, a certain logic applicable to the basics of education and the way we go about practicing it. Maybe the student is, at least in some ways, smarter, worth more credit, than we might initially think. Sure, some are perhaps more given to understand some things better than others. Hey, I know my own limitations when it comes to calculus and those logic games found on LSAT exams, for instance.

But I'm sure all of us can remember a story of learning, one in which lines of traditional hierarchy are blurred. I remember high school chemistry class. Mrs. V. asked us to come up with a project where we take it upon ourselves to teach the class about a certain matter not yet touched upon so far in class. I sat down and pondered in the college library, and felt that we were missing something: where do the higher elements come from; how do they get to earth? So, I looked it up, and found out about 'nuclear astrophysics,' that it takes stars and great explosions called super novas to create higher elements out of lower elements. (It hadn't been explained to us how all this had come about, just been presented to us as a given, vague about the creation of all but the basic hydrogen and helium. History Channel's History of the Entire World in Two Hours reminded me of all the import of remarkable elemental processes.)

So me and my buddy, Mark F., we reviewed all we could find in the best library available to us, and we made our presentation. Maybe it was the simplicity of it, that there wasn't all that much to teach or show, just that all this making of metal and stuff had happened very far away, in places very hard to imagine, but that stuff like the iron in our blood came not from the Earth itself, but from cosmic places, think of it. The teacher, she heard us out, but it ended up our buddies who had simply read a chapter from the textbook we had used, got a better grade.

The same thing happens again, and again. A student is asked to read Paradise Lost, that part where we are kicked out of the garden... 'What is happening here?' is the question. Well, you have to stare at it a while to get what's happening... People are turning to words, just as Adam must as he takes his first steps out of the Garden. But you get your paper in too late, and get a D, and life proceeds accordingly. C'est la vie.

Ultimately, there is a point to be made. It could be a revolutionary one. It could be behind the reasons the passing of Mr. Jobs is so important to us, a celebrating of the equality of the learner, of the accessibility of information and, by deduction, the skill we all have for dealing with information.

I am reminded of the basic message of Robert F. Kennedy in his visit to South Africa, in 1966, that the blacks of South Africa were worthy of being educated and having equal rights. It goes without, or with less, saying, but it speaks of an educational attitude, one America stands for, as RFK mentions that America doesn't just stand for what it's against, not just the negative, not just 'we oppose Communism,' and that's all, but that America stands for that positive marvel of equal educations, the power we all have latent within us to be smart, wise, cultured, decent, and even like the Buddha ultimately, understanding everything, with great peace.

Perhaps that is the point of educating and encouraging someone so well as Jack and Bobby were, that the subject begins to understand all the power they have within at the level of personal taste and curiosity and capability. Confidence. As confidence must revolve and center in on the thing one has to be confident about, namely, the power of learning.