Yesterday's Words, Tomorrow's Challenges

Frank L. Christ
Co-Director of the Winter Institute

There is a moment between yesterday and tomorrow. That moment is always now. Some of those "now" moments make a difference as we act, react, or choose not to act or react. Yet for all the uniqueness of our "now" moments, someone like us has also been suspended between a yesterday and a tomorrow like ours and has drawn upon a remembered phrase for insight, strength, or respite. We call those remembered phrases, quotations, and today I would like to share with you some remembered phrases or quota-tions that have guided my personal and professional life quotations that I began to collect in my prep school days and that I still continue to accumulate today. Quotations that, in the words of Disraeli, perpetuate ..."the wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages." It is in the spirit of Disraeli's affirmation of the value of quotations that I speak with you today.

Before I share some of my personal quotations with you, would each of you take a few moments to center yourself and recall one quotation that you have read or heard that has or is impacting on your life. Then, would you share this remembered quotation with someone at your table. The exact words of your quotation or the name of its author are not that important. What is important is that those words affected you either personally or professionally.

Perhaps, one of your quotations that you have just shared at your table will also be one that I will share with you. These few quotations that I have selected from my yesterday do not come from a book of quotations as an artificial exercise in erudition or postprandial platitudes. They are distilled from a lifetime of reading and listening and reflecting. I share them with you to be reflected upon in your future moments of tranquillity when you need an insight into tomorrow's problems, strength for tomorrow's decisions, or respite from tomorrow's problems and decisions.

My first two quotations come from ancient Greece. The first is attributed either to Thales, one of the Seven Sages, or to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. It is "gnothe sauton" "know thyself." As I reflect back upon this phrase, I recall the words of Polonius to his son, Laertes, as he sums up his farewell advice to him: "This above all to thine own self be true..."

To know ourselves and to be true to ourselves is more difficult today than it was in ancient Greece or in medieval Denmark. Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon, pollution of our air, water, and soil, human rights violations both here and abroad, senseless acts of terror-ism, nuclear threat, Desert Storm, inflation, the national deficit, the homeless, AIDS, drug abuse, the information explosion, future shock all have complicated and continue to complicate our knowing who we are. All of these have stressed and continue to stress our will to

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maintain our personal and professional integrity. Yet, it is in knowing ourselves and being true to ourselves that we must begin and must end as we spend our lifetime learning about ourselves through practical experience and the study of science, philosophy, music, literature, art, and psychology.

The second of yesterday's words comes from Socrates as we know him through Plato's writings: If we live Socrates's words, we join the ranks of the world's restless ones the St. Augustines, the Michaelangelos, the Da Vincis, the Martin Luthers, the Galileos, the G. K. Chestertons, the Madame Curies, the Boris Pasternaks, the Anais Nins, the Buckminster Fullers the world's malcontents who believed with Socrates that "the unexam-ined life is not worth living."

Socrates's words have contributed to my restlessness as I have moved through several careers: as a construction engineer in the military, as a physical educator and coach at West Point, as an instructor of classical rhetoric at a Jesuit college, as a director of a Great Books program at a small liberal arts college, as a director of student programs for orientation and foreign students, as an executive trainer for business and industry, and as a counselor and administrator of a university learning assistance center.

Socrates's words have impacted my professional life as I adapted them to my professional workplace. In an article that I wrote for the Journal of Developmental Education, I suggested that for us as learning assistance professionals "the unexamined activity is not worth doing;" "the unexamined routine is not worth perpetuating;" and "the unexamined file is not worth keeping."

Socrates's words can inspire all of us to examine the unexaminable and to reexamine the examined so that we can meet tomorrow's challenges not only in global and national politics, in the conservation and renewal of natural resources, in the distribution of economic resources, but also in our personal and professional lives as husbands, wives, lovers, fathers, mothers, teachers, practitioners, administrators, and lifelong learners.

Reflecting back on this life of knowing, I often turn to a statement by Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, who reminds me that "a merely well-informed [person] man is the most useless bore on God's earth." Knowledge is for doing. Prospero, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, finds this out when he is driven into exile because he has paid no attention to affairs of state, insisting that his "library is dukedom large enough." What is learned in the physical and natural sciences can and must provide efficiency, comfort, convenience, health, longevity for ourselves and others. What is learned in the social sciences can and must provide caring for and sharing with others. What is learned in the humanities can and must provide beauty, recreation, and relaxation for ourselves and others. We must remember not only to examine life but also to change it to what we believe it can and must be.

The next examples of yesterday's words concern lifelong learning learning beyond our degrees and textbook knowledge. Milton's words remind us that "a good book is the

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precious lifeblood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

As we reflect on these words, how would we answer this question that Admiral Rickover put to junior officers as he interviewed them for positions on his staff: "What three good books have you read in the past month?" Not textbooks but rather books of great poets and thinkers, what Jacques Maritain called "the foster fathers of intelligence." Can we write down titles of ten to twenty good books that we have read in the past year? Books that can help us to echo the words of educator Sylvia Ashton Warner, who proclaimed passionately: "I am my own uni-verse, I my own professor." Our education, our life should prepare us to be our own professors. There is a quotation by Thomas Carlyle from Heroes and Hero Worship that I have used for years to end my reading and study skills workshops. It sums up one of the goals of higher education a goal with which we are all intimately involved. Carlyle said, "All that a university or final highest school can do is but what the first school began doing, teach us to read." To read with understanding. To read with compassion. To read and remember what we need to know. To read between the lines. To read selectively. To read to solve problems. To read to make decisions. To read to ask questions. To read and interpret. To read and extrapolate. To read and apply.

Recently I have added another quotation to Carlyle's, one more appropriate to our era of an information explosion in which a Niagara of words engulfs us with more than 30,000 new books annually, 500,000 scientific papers annually, and hundreds of thousands of pages in journals, periodicals, newspapers, not annually but weekly. This quotation is from Gujuroy, a Human Resources Management consultant, who said, "The illiterate [person] man is not one who cannot read. It is the [person] man who has not learned to learn." For us professionally, learning to learn and helping others to learn to learn is what we are all about in postsecondary learning assistance programs.

We are aware that decisions are becoming increasingly more complex and that information or lack of information can mean the difference between problem and solution, success or failure. We are also painfully aware that facts are not enough. We must not only be informed but wise with a wisdom that sees decisions affecting humans, living and unborn. That wisdom lies buried in the tribal lore, the folk lore, the literature of our cultures. It is there for us to seek out, to reflect upon, to adapt for tomorrow's challenges. It lies in books like the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Analects and Dialects of Confucius, the Popul Vuh of the Mayans. In such books are more of yesterday's words for you and me to read and reread, so that we can meet tomorrow's challenges.

With these words from yesterday, you and I can live a different life a life that is exemplified in my final quotation from William Allen White: "I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday, and I love today."

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