Education, Mis-education, and the Mountains as Professors

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0400

A little more than a year ago now, I decided to drop off the grid. I had been making a long slow escape from my previous life of working in politics, and I had finally truly crossed the Rubicon: I bought a cabin high up in the mountains of Colorado, hidden in the woods, beyond a locked Forest Service gate, and down a steep dirt road. I originally looked at it as simply the culmination of a dream”a single-family home in the middle of the forest on a stream. After this past year, I now understand it was all about educating myself.

My mother, Karen Laub Novak (whose work has been discussed in these pages before by writers far more talented than I) is to blame. She was always fully focused on the concrete, the here and now, the tactile”even as she embraced the abstract, the theoretical, and the imagined. As must be obvious, she was an artist, and this balancing act came naturally.

When my two siblings and I were children, she emphasized this trick of high-wire talent from day one. She believed that, “In school, the emphasis on teaching the child cognitive skills is nearly total. Intelligence is very narrowly defined.” As she noted in her article, “Children and Creativity”:

Continue Reading »

First Things RSS Feed - Jana Novak

Education, Mis-education, and the Mountains as Professors