The Beginning of the Academic Year - The Right Way to Learn

It is the beginning of the academic year. The new student is both bewildered and excited. He or she must decide what courses or papers to do, and discover whether the room-mate is quite what they’d hoped for, where are the best places to hang out with friends and, finally, locate the Chaplaincy which many who never thought of themselves as religious may later find to be a home from home, a real stronghold.

Having been a mature student myself, I have found that the defining moment in a person’s first week at university comes with their first lecture, or supervision or tutorial. At the end of it they know for sure whether or not they are in the right place doing the right thing. If the course is right, and the place is right, a certain bond of understanding will have established itself between those who are taught and those who teach. This is because the purpose of good education is to ‘lead out’ (from the Latin ‘educare’), to free a person into real creativity. The person teaching is therefore entrusted with a great responsibility. Their task is to connect with the student in the realm of understanding, which is not always the same as knowing a great many facts. Teachers are asked to convey something more than information to those they are serving. Their task is one of ministry. They minister to the unique person in ‘leading’ or ‘drawing out’ the best of that person. 

Good teachers change lives, because they sense, or ‘intuit’, how to connect with those they are teaching at the head-heart level where a person’s real longings and dreams for a better life and a better world are lodged. It is here that the imagination is first awakened in childhood and it is in knowing how to rekindle that imagination that a teacher connects with a pupil or student and enables that person to learn. Real thinking begins with imagination. So learning is not just a matter of acquiring information, but of discovering what it is that we are really seeking in the context of classroom or lecture hall. In doing so, we know immediately whether the course we have chosen is right for us. If it is not right, my advice to a new student would be to seek out a wise and trustworthy teacher and ask for their help in changing courses. Time dedicated to study and training are usually a once in a life time opportunity, a gift, even though we pay for it, which is not to be wasted on the wrong subject. 

In an age where education is fast becoming a commodity and students are no longer learners, but consumers or clients, the ability to learn, and later work imaginatively is vital. A course which is geared to a particular profession needs people whose imagination has been developed so that they can apply what they have learned for the betterment of other human beings, of society and to the survival of the planet. They need to have learned disciplined imagination. This is the point of all those essays and lab experiments.

Disciplined imagination enables us to engage with the wider purpose of a loving Creator. So academic work, or any kind of professional training, is the most important gift we can give to anyone, because it will equip them to participate in the re-making, the re-creation, of God’s world. We are training them to be agents of his mercy, his redemptive love. A lawyer working on a case, a doctor treating a patient, politicians and those engaged in commerce and finance will all be part of this process. Each is given the means, through their education and training, to work for justice, or healing, or fair and honest standards of trading and financial transactions.

Two things emerge from this. The first is that no one can learn and later apply wisdom to their work if they are primarily concerned with their own advancement or personal benefit – the ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude which has crept into all areas of public and commercial life, especially since the 1980’s. The same is true, paradoxically, of talent or gift that is sacrificed or compromised out of pragmatism or a misplaced sense of duty.

The second is every bit as important as the first. It involves accountability, being willing to take responsibility for one’s work and for its effect on others. Ultimately, we shall be accountable before God for the way we have used the gifts he has given us, including our own professional skills and intelligence. Part of that accountability involves how we think of those who we have been trained to serve. Are they simply clients, or consumers from whom we benefit personally? (whatever we may tell them or, for that matter, tell ourselves.) Or are they our own kin, part of the human family, whose wellbeing matters to us? Their wellbeing will include getting value and quality for the services they pay for and truthful integrity from those they elect to govern them. Learning to be responsible to God, to other members of the human family and to the planet itself is the purpose of any study and of any work. Nothing must get in the way of it.