By Terry Boyle
Since moving to the desert, I’ve offered up my services to teach literature courses for retirees. It’s nothing too taxing. I get to share the works of authors I love.
Most people on the courses have had professional lives and are keen to keep their minds active. When COVID determined how we used public spaces, our classes went to Zoom and continue to be offered online. The advantage to using this platform is that retirees from other states can join us.
We’ve had people from Chicago, Montana, Indiana and even Germany sign up. I’ve been teaching these courses for almost five years now, and it’s been quite an enjoyable experience.
Ask any former professor, and while they may miss the actual dynamic of teaching, they don’t miss the arduous task of grading papers. Mature students bring to literature a lifetime of experience. Their insights are seasoned by the joys and sorrows life brings to us all.
I began my academic life as a mature student of 23, which back then in 1984 was considered mature. As part of an access course, we studied sociology, history and literature.
Going to university was a life-changing experience for me. I was an average student at secondary school, and left when I was 15. I hated school. My whole secondary schooling happened during the height of the Troubles, and since our school was close to a police station, rioting between students and the army was a frequent occurrence.
Given the political climate of the times, I’m surprised I learned anything at all. Over the next eight years, I tried to make it as a tradesman. Anyone who knows me is bound to keel over with laughter at the thought of me becoming a joiner.
My office work skills were just as feeble. Working as a volunteer in a reconciliation community suited me … for a while. My stint as a parish volunteer was good … for a while.
Going from a community to living on my own in a disused convent was definitely strange. Given my drifting nature, it was obvious I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life.
Thankfully, I had a good friend, a Benedictine monk, who pushed me to consider university. Sometimes there’s that one person in your life who sees your potential more than you can. G.B. Shaw once said, ‘two percent of people think, three percent think they think, and ninety-five percent would rather die than think.’ I was one of those people who wanted to think, and third-level education helped to open my critical mind.
The Value of Questioning
I started to value the importance of questioning. Nothing was sacred. If what you believe is worth anything, it needs to bear the scrutiny of a critical mind.
Education changes you. As you begin to process and allow those questions to sink in, you start to open your mind to new possibilities. Your thoughts find flight, landing in new places where you lose your bearings. You lose some things and gain others.
Values and beliefs deepen or change. Knowledge has its own kind of power, and can liberate you from systems that have taught you how to think. You realize those ideas you held onto so tightly were created by humans just like you. Humans, who, like you, were trying to understand the world.
When you have the freedom to think for yourself, it forces you to grow up. You’re now responsible for what you understand as the truth.
There’s been a major shift in your thinking. Once upon a time, you had a parental system telling you what you should or shouldn’t believe. Now that you’ve begun to think as an adult, you need to inform yourself by understanding there is more than one way to look at the same thing. And, while this can be confusing, it’s quite liberating.
What appears like solid ground suddenly becomes shifting sand. I still remember how it felt when I experienced my first earthquake. Sitting outside with a glass of wine in my hand, the earth beneath me (the ground I’d thought to be unyielding) began to roll in waves. My whole understanding of the physical world changed on that day. What I once was sure of proved to be uncertain.
Education is as ground-shifting as any earthquake, if we allow ourselves to think. The world we once thought we knew becomes more of a mystery to us. It’s exciting, challenging, and scary.
I can see why people choose not to think. It would be easier to simply accept someone else’s view of things.
Experiencing a seismic shift is not something most of us want to ever experience, but it happens. When the earth returns to its usual state, we can reflect on the experience and learn from it or pretend it will never happen again.
There are lots of people who are exposed to other ways of seeing the world who remain unaffected by those differences. The ground beneath them might roll in waves below them but they continue to be unaffected by it.
What gives me so much pleasure in teaching mature students is their openness. The ground has shifted a lot during their lifetime. They understand we live in a time of constant change.
Technology has changed society in profound ways. Old institutions of political and religious thought are constantly challenged.
But if we are to evolve and grow, we need to embrace these challenges and dispense of what flies in the face of reality to embrace what is true. Mature students have undergone many changes in their lives. They understand what it is to shed an old skin and take on a new one.
The precariousness of life may scare them, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting to know more, even if it makes the world less of a comfortable place. Knowledge is meant to make us uncomfortable, especially if we’re trying to protect ourselves from uncertainty, and choose to delude ourselves about the world.
Check out Terry’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwP7ynN3Y2clKt5a_ueI3VQ
