Learning by doing things

 Sam Smith –I graduated as an undergraduate from Harvard magna cum probation and never further pursued formal education. I have long assumed that it was my problem, but lately a quite different explanation has risen, namely that while I wasn’t all that good at learning things, I was quite good at doing them.

The evidence of the latter has always been with me but I have accepted intellectual America’s assumption that good scholarship outranks good workmanship.

An early contrary clue came in the summer of my sophomore year when I worked as a newsman for a Washington radio station and was offered a job when I graduated. This encouraged me to work much harder at our student run radio station, eventually becoming news director but unable to accept the station manager post because I was on probation.

I also started covering the Cambridge city council which I now view as my best course at Harvard. It was there that the reporter for the Harvard Crimson newspaper and I were treated exceptionally well. The mayor once even bought me coffee. I even had an honor higher than I ever got for[. my academic essays – namely the Boston Globe picking up my story about the councilmember who declared that the Harvard Yard should be paved and turned into a parking lot.

Not surprisingly, I ended up in journalism rather than something requiring more academic skills and, until recently, too often accepted my jobs as intellectually inferior to, say, ones that required more classroom time.

But when I reexamine my past I also find that I was blessed by some non-college teachers who helped to create my skills and choices. For example, as a young teenager I worked on a farm --  driving a tractor and a truck at 13  thanks to a farmer who gave me daily classes in all sorts of agricultural stuff.  And long before I served as a Coast Guard officer, an ex-Navy guy who had started  a  boatyard and yacht club taught me all sorts of things as did the guy who used me as the crew for his paid cruises down the coast of Maine.

Even my college major – anthropology - had its start early thanks to Howard Platt  who was one of two high school teachers in the country who offered such a course. I was one of only six Harvard anthro majors, and three of them came from my school, Germantown Friends. As I wrote many years later:

All the talk about critical race theory is stunning for its failure to address one major matter: the positive aspects of multiculturalism. As I have mentioned before, I was blessed with learning about the latter thanks to a course I took in high school…

Howard Platt was in a class by himself. In 9th grade, alone except for one other high school teacher in America at the time, he offered a highly popular course in anthropology.

Mr. Platt was a tall, bald, bespectacled Quaker who spoke both quietly and expressively. It was a wonderful world that he laid before us. Not the stultifying world of our parents, the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of endless options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural relativism was simultaneously a message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture; you could always go live with the Eskimos, the Indians or the Arabs. By the time the bell rang I was often ready to move, an inclination heightened by research into the mammary gland variations of cultures as revealed by the photos in National Geographic.

What we learned that year was strikingly different from what we were learning elsewhere. The world around us, in many ways, was teaching us to define our place by a process of exclusion, a place secured by the fact that we were smarter, whiter, or faster than someone else.

In Mr. Platt's class, things were different. The world was defined by people who built igloos and pyramids and stone axes and rafts that could cross an ocean and they lived together in strange combinations and went into the forest to have babies and some of them had more gods than others and some didn't like to fight as much as others and some thought if you died in your sleep your soul would fly away….

By the end of the year I could take the Romans or leave them. I liked their domes but didn't like them beating up people because they were 'barbarians' and had some land the Romans wanted. I liked the independently invented domes of the Eskimos too, but didn't care for their tendency to dump their old people out in the snow to die when the food got short. I had become acquainted with so many cultures so vastly different from my own and from each other that I was hard pressed to say which was inferior or superior. I was not even inclined to try.

I had become, without knowing the term, a cultural relativist. Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of equality, or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He taught something far more important, something missing from the present discourse on race, something too often absent still from school and college curricula. Mr. Platt opened a world to us in which its variety was not something to fear or regulate but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not an obstacle, but a gift that came with being human.

When I think about how I ended up who I am, it was folks like this – not college professors -  who best describe where I came from. In fact, while I still remember many of my teachers at my Quaker high school, I remember hardly any at Harvard. 

I now better understand that formal education, useful as it can be, is only part of the story and I suggest to others, especially those with young children, that you pay attention to the possibilities for learning by doing things and not just reading about them.