Barr and Klein and Harrell and us

A question I'd wanted to ask, if I hadn't been so engrossed in observing what was going on there between the tutors and the few bold students, bringing in their Socrates and their Strauss, went to that experience of wonder, but not as a philosophical concatenation, but as the older intimations of self and world, the careening learning of childhood--to what stage in life should we assign such an education as this? and then, prior to that, in what sense can we educate in wonder? Is the child's wonderment at all comparable to the adult's? to the philosopher's? or is each, while unmixed, somehow apt to its place? On the face of it, you might say the wonder of childhood is prerequisite for the free play of intellect, for it to develop later in life at all, rather than becoming ossified and scared into confines. Then the sort of education that would allow for that free play of intellect (proto-intellect if you prefer) in a child really looks nothing like a curriculum of great books, but something close to what someone tried to sketch out from the hispter's phone's lines of Shakespeare's Arden, a learning how to read, and to read between, so as to create meaning. The work of refining that, vis-a-vis sedimentary assumptions, if we permit it at all, comes later, once some basis is esablished--a tree after all is rooted in a soil--and prehaps unconsciously at first, while the wonder is all-embraing, and self-consciousness nil. Questions of confidence hardly arise, only avoiding fear and seeking delight. Personally, my great books as a child were legos, swing sets, and videogames. Books at school were preferable to the waste of time of most of the lessons, then a good in themselves later.

At stake in the life of the mind lecture and question period was the freedom of the intellect, the capacity of ordinary non-great writers to have insights, but also the girl sitting up close who goes out for drinks with the tutors every week, and the option of sitting outside watching the same sunset as glows there in the great hall, but with the rabbits and birds. All told, the discussion of the questions lasted much longer than the representation of the two ideas--both the question why is it so? why is there something? and the audience questions around the table, where there were attempts to muddy the distinction or cast it as a tension, or ask what the outcome should be, or how palpable assumptions and this sediment are--even tentative revisions for the college involving Lady Gaga or film, which sound excellent even if they were made in jest--but for all the disagreements and quibbles, to me it looked like a lot of the same assumptions were still at work, and wonderment at original creative insight balked at, and too many old white men sitting around, whose institution pays them to do so, and if it is at controversy over its idea of itself, it will be from that homogeneity rather than from the fruitful diversity of thinking.