Learning about the world is done…in the world

As a bookish person, I used to be skeptical toward a saying of older peers in college that “I learned more from the people than the classes.”  However, I returned to the saying throughout college, usually after I got to know someone and understand how both knowable and unknowable s/he was.  Still, “bubble” or “Ivory tower” I think are pretty apt descriptions of universities.  Of course, each of us live in a bubble of some kind, but there is a certain distance one gets when one only lives in a relatively comfortable space around people pretty similar to him or her in general life goals (i.e. material and professional success) and socio-economic class.

I can say today that I have probably learned more about the world in the few years after college than in all of my years of formal education, and the more I learn, as a high school teacher of mine once said, the less I know.  I do credit my education for teaching me how to work hard and to love learning, but I think in some ways, the tendency toward approaching problems like a Western “rational” thinker rather than a human being that is inculcated in college has been limiting to me.

There are many instances when I see theory limiting common sense thinking in the broader public.  Take the barometer that commentators are using to measure Obama’s cabinet choices: from liberal to moderate.  How rarely does a politician, even the most doctrinaire, hew to an ideology?  Usually, I find that moderate often means someone in the establishment–a Joe Lieberman type–while liberal is someone farther out.  If the media wrote mostly about politicians not in terms of their ideology but in terms of their actual, tangible interests–usually determined by their friends, their campaign contributions, their past line of work–I think we would get a better picture of our politicians.  Certainly even politicians have worldviews, but I think these are more complex than left vs. right, as most people’s are, and even the least charitable right-winger can usually find some charity in him when something bad happens to his family member (think about all of the law and order politicians who have gotten their kin out of trouble).

And every time I find myself settling on a conclusion about some problem in New York that is driven by a philosophy, I talk to someone else who informs me of another, equally valid way of thinking about the same thing.  And I realize how harmful certain bits of unbending theory about the nature of this city, the ways to drive growth, and so forth, are if they are thought of in a vaccuum.  For instance, there is the thinking that big box retail development is good because it brings jobs and cheap goods, as was often said about a place like DC USA in my old neighborhood of Columbia Heights.  The argument that there are other possible uses for the land, that retail jobs pay less than other types of jobs like blue collar, etc. are lost.  Of course, a DC USA supporter could point out that no blue collar businesses were interested in that land.  But either way, it’s a problem that is best dealt with by talking to people.  This is why I think the best reporting is done on the streets and not behind a computer, which is why I hope the struggle of newspapers and supposed growth of online news will not put an end to face-to-face reporting.