The following is Part One of an excellent keynote address delivered by Dr. Shanon Brooks on April 13, 2004. Dr. Brooks will be speaking at the Thomas Jefferson Leadership Education Forum ( FATJEF) in Rancho Cucamonga, CA on April 24.  I hope that you will take the time to read this.  In fact, print it and save it to refer to often.  It is an excellent challenge to each of us. Part Two will be featured Monday. ~ TommyMom

THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX

Dr. Shanon Brooks

In the immortal words of Jerry McGuire, “we live in a cynical world.”  We also live in a surreal environment of entitlement, enlargement, enticement, fat blasting and muscling up.  With the baby boomers refusing to grow old and a very individualist Generation X, it is little wonder everyone is looking for that miracle cure, the solution in a bottle; a quick fix.

In this “blame everyone else”, “I want my fair share”, “I deserve it” world, we are looking for the fountain of youth of “quick fixes” (and spending in the search, hundreds of thousands of hours of time and literally billions of dollars).  We can’t really help it, it

surrounds us in the media and entertainment, it is the new morality taught in our schools and churches.  This search for the “quick fix” is the new (old) American approach to marriage and the modern family, personal and corporate finance, functions of government and domestic and foreign policy.

The search for the “quick fix” impacts the food we eat and how we eat our food.  It controls our attitudes about just about everything we do and think.  It is the antithesis of patience, compound interest, traditional white weddings, Olympic gold earned on sheer will, delayed gratification, courting, “wait and see” and “building for the next generation.”

The last three generations of Americans have suffered immensely from this search, but I fear, nothing like the current generation, which has little or no mooring to the ancient bulwark of principle. The more we turn “otherward” the less we are satisfied with paying the price to have, live or be satisfied with the who or how we are and moving forward from that “plot of ground which is given to [us] to till.”  No, we will continue to dream today, with no effort, for that which our grandparents spent a life time living to acquire, and never securing the knowledge that they possess—that the joy is not in the getting, but in the living towards.

In education (not schooling mind you), we make huge strides in the direction of entering on the path of becoming true liberal artists, only to be sucked out to sea with the tsunami undertow of public opinion and fear of pain.  The truth is, unless we can resolve to just be honest with ourselves, our attempts at Liber Education will end up in little more than slightly higher mediocrity.  There is a price to pay to get a superb leadership education, and in our day everyone seems bent on finding a short cut.

Acquiring a liberal arts education is likely to be the most difficult and painful thing you have ever attempt in your entire existence.  It impacts every aspect of your domestic, religious and professional life. If you are alone in this endeavor, you will be chastised, ridiculed, gossiped about, made fun of, and left out.  You will spend hours upon hours in solitude studying books that nobody you know has ever heard of.  People will say, “While I admire your effort, what kind of job can you get with that?”

But it gets worse.  First, if you are unfortunate enough to have a support group to study with, then the going really gets rough.  Whenever two or more people get together to study (without a world class liberal arts mentor), to gain a liberal arts education, it is nearly always a failure before it begins.  Immediately they start to make it easier by distributing the workload, dividing the reading up between themselves so they can “share the experience”.  This is anathema in most cases.  It is like trying to build muscle mass on your own body by having one person work out their own legs, another doing their own biceps and so on.  It might be a great work out, but you gain little from the exercise.

Second, it is so tempting to find anything claiming to be connected with Thomas Jefferson Education and just adopt it as the real thing.  It often costs less and always requires less.  “The easier, the better” seems to be our national motto. And we are

tempted to apply it to our education just like every other aspect of modern life.  After hearing great mentors promote superb but gut-wrenching hard education, we are so thrilled when someone comes along with the “quick fixed” short cut version.

Third, particularly if you are working with youth, you will naturally begin to look for ways to streamline and mainstream the curriculum, easing the youth into the educational process. You do this so you can impact more youth and help them improve their minds.  But this is a little like watering down the Kool-Aid so everyone can have some; they all get a drink but nobody ever knows what Loonie Lime truly tastes like.   Remember, we do all of this with the best intentions, with vigorous efforts to ensure balance and good feelings all around—at the sacrifice of sound principles of extremely hard work, missed

games and parties, nights crying in frustration, and mornings dawning with new and solid realization and resolve.   This protected, “take the hardness out”approach to education,

especially applied to acquiring a liberal arts education, results in the following

natural consequences as summarized by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they loose all heart.  If the young

merchant fails, men say he is ruined.  If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and complaining the rest of his life.  A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.

Aristotle to Augustine, Homer to Shakespeare, Adler to Hutchinson, Barzun to Lewis, Dickens to L’Amour—it is always the same.  True Leadership- Statesmanship comes out of none other than pain, struggle with God and self, tenacity and hard, long study. This concept is no where better discussed than by Mortimer Adler in his essay Invitation to the Pain of Learning:

One of the reasons why education given by our schools is so frothy and vapid is that the American people generally—the parent more than the teacher—wish childhood to be unspoiled by pain.  Childhood must be a period of delight, of [happy] indulgence [of] impulses.  It must be given every avenue of unimpeded expression, which of course is pleasant; and it must not be made to suffer the impositions of discipline or the exactions of duty, which of course are painful. . . What lies behind my remark is a distinction between two views of education.

In one view, education is something externally added to a person, as his clothing or other accoutrements.  We cajole him into standing there willingly while we fit him; and in doing this we must be guided by his likes and dislikes, by his notion of what enhances his appearance.  In the other view, education is an interior transformation of a person’s mind and character.  He is plastic material to be improved not according to his inclinations, but according to what is good for him.  But because he is a living thing, and not dead clay, the transformation can be effected only through his own activity.

Teachers of every sort can help, but they can only help in the process of learning that must be dominated at every moment by the activity of the learner.   And the fundamental activity that is involved in every kind of genuine learning is intellectual activity, the activity generally known as thinking.   Any learning which takes place without thinking is necessarily of the sort I have called external and additive—learning passively acquired, for which the common name is “information.” Without thinking, the kind of learning which transforms a mind, gives it new insights, enlightens it, deepens understanding, [and] elevates the spirit, simply cannot occur.

Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful.  It is hard

work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do.  It is fatiguing, not refreshing.  If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think.

You do not need it easier.  You don’t.  My colleagues and I often hear people who are learning about Thomas Jefferson Education  saying things like: “that just won’t work,” “we don’t have time,” “you just can’t expect that out of teenagers,” “it’s crazy to study so much,” or our favorite: “I liked this other seminar better because the lady giving it made

Thomas Jefferson Education so much easier.”  Great mentors hate that one—they work so hard getting people to put in the hard work, and then someone with the excited flush from eight months of reading classics goes around teaching people the “easier road”

to a great education.  What a waste!

No, what we need in our homes and in our generation is for our education to be much, much harder.  The strength and fortitude for the completion of a future mission is never developed within the comforts of our “Comfort Zone.”  It is incumbent on parents and mentors of the youth to embody the “leadership arts” standard, profoundly articulated by

Josiah Bunting:

Mentors must embody the qualities of character we wish to educe in our students.  When we say ‘educe,’ we mean draw forth . . . be paragons of the sort of excellence we want our students to learn.  And not only learn, but to become . . . . These men and women, these mentors, are themselves unfinished persons.  They are to be strivers, searchers, tenaciously engaged in their work.

This is just as true today as it was in the times of great mentors like Moses, Socrates, Christ, and George Wythe.  It was Sir Walter Scott who wrote, “All men who have turned out worth anything, have had the chief hand in their own education.”