17 August 2022
I have been interested in education and addiction for almost the same length of time: since I started having long ideas-based conversations with my father, as a boy. The common thread linking recovery to education, is human agency. Both recovery and genuine education require and increase the agency of the growing individual.
Although there is no series planned on the theme of education, I suspect this to be the first of many that will emerge, G-d & The Fates willing. The inspiration for this blog comes from the daily helping of A Word a Day which includes A Thought for Today. On 27 June of this year, that thought was that The highest result of education is tolerance. -Helen Keller, author and lecturer (27 Jun 1880-1968). It might be fruitful to trace, through inference, the logic behind that thought.
The word educate comes from the Latin “educare, to bring up, educate” (Morris, 1975, p. 415). That etymology refers the reader to deuk in the appendix of that dictionary. The synonyms associated with deuk are pull, draw, lead; draw, drag, tow; depending on the age of the language and the country of origin (England, Germany). The point is to provide a sense of channeling or directing toward being a specific way (pull, lead, drag, tow) versus having something brought out from within a person (draw, pull). The contemporary definitions support the former view. “1. To provide with knowledge or training, especially through formal schooling” (Morris, 1975, p. 415). That is, the more contemporary definition speaks to the inputting of external content rather than the extraction of character.
Before moving on, the associated word schooling is noteworthy. This is the first time I have understood why groups of fish are referred to as schools: there is an imposed uniformity of behaviour required to belong to a school. That behaviour may be driven from within, by our innate desire to belong, or it may be a more a Putin-Xinping-Woke imposition of “superior” ideas on lesser mortals for their own “enrichment.” There’s a line from Ivan Illich that conveys this meaning well: “Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school” (Illich, 1970, p. xix).
I do not believe all schooling is bad. I do believe that the imposition of unchallenged ideas is bad. I believe the best educators (and citizens) are those able to retest ideas—over and over again—in light of new and old arguments. It is for this reason that I am a defender of free thought and free speech: I believe well-reasoned, publicly available arguments will easily unmask and defeat dogma, of any sort and at any permitted time. This, to me, is what tolerance is about.
The variants within its definition are fascinating. n. 1. The capacity for or practice of allowing or respecting the nature, beliefs, or behaviour of others. 2. a. Leeway for variation from a standard. b. The permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension. 3. The capacity to endure; especially, the ability to endure hardship or pain. 4. a. Physiological resistance to poison. b. The capacity to absorb a drug continuously or in large doses without adverse effect. [Latin tolerare, to bear...]” (Morris, 1975, p. 1351).
If, per Helen Keller, the highest result of education is tolerance, then, what do the definitions of her terms tell us? The shortest takeaway is that being well educated fosters an ability to think flexibly, with an intentional leeway from prescribed standards. If prescribed standards can be equated with dogma, a shorter explanation of Ms. Keller’s statement is that non-dogmatic (or non-conformist) thinking is a virtue, aim, and product of good education. And it should be emphasized that the word “good,” above, is not a class-based reference but a quality-based reference, the two too rarely aligning.
The final point comes from Plato’s Apology in which he reported that Socrates, at his trial, stated that “…the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (West & West, 1998, Apology of Socrates, 38a, p. 92). That seems the essence of education: the ability to identify, examine, and question one’s own and one’s society’s values. And, uncoincidentally, some of the people most likely to have begun that exercise are those people who have moved through addiction and into recovery.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Garg, A. Word a Day (2022, June 27). https://wordsmith.org/words/mainpast.html
Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. Harper & Row, Publishers.
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage illustrated dictionary of the English language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
West, T. G. & West, G. S. (1998). Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds. Cornell University Press.
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