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Another Sort of Learning

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This book is a compilation of essays written by James V. Schall. The main theme that connects the disparate themes of the essays is investigating reality. Three examples of the intellectually provocative essay titles are: "What the Student owes his Teacher", "On the Seriousness of Sports" and "On teaching the Most Important Things". The most charming and unique feature of Schall's book is the "various and sundry" book lists that follow at the end of each chapter. The book lists are not merely bibliographies, rather they are meant to provide a syllabi for the reader who wishes to further his education in the realm of the things that matter most in life: i.e. suffering, love, death, immortality, education, morality, politics etc.. Many of the names and books on the lists are venerable entries, such as Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Shakespeare etc., however the lists are full of authors and titles of which I had never yet heard mention in my life. The books are presented as grocery lists (though he does not claim the lists to be exhaustive, who could?) of books and articles that should be read if someone seriously desires to receive an education in "what is". Thus, one could be in High School or be a Ph. D. candidate (or a Ph. D. already for that matter) and benefit greatly from this book One might look at this book as the exposed skeleton of all great books and the minds of the greats who produced them. We are led more deeply into reality, exposing "avenues" and "alleyways" and even "broad Boulevards" we may have never guessed existed. If we think and contemplate with them, we will be able to stand on their shoulders and see far and deeply. This is a first-rate intellectual adventure.

Fr. Schall, professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown, speaks for all true bibliophiles when he writes, "There is something narrow, even self-defeating, in reading a great work only once." ANOTHER SORT OF LEARNING is a collection of short essays on the necessity of making and using a personal library. That means gathering about oneself wonderful books on diverse topics and marvelling as the years roll by that, as he says at one point, "Everything reminds me of something in Plato."

Fr. Schall shuns the approach of a Master List of Books To Read Or Else. Instead, he writes elegant, meaty essays on education, philosophy, science, politics, history, and revelation, and concludes each essay with a short list of the books that nourish his own thoughts on the subject at hand. Examples of such lists include, "Unlikely List of Books to Keep Sane By", "Books You Will Never Be Assigned", "Seven Books on Sports and Serious Reflection", "Seven Books on the Limits of Politics", and "Five Books Addressed to the Heart of Things".

Why haven't I begun to do this? Isn't it true that, in my dotage, the books I have loved and marked and returned to and brooded over and dreamed by will reveal more about The Real Me than anything else?

Schall champions "the recovery of permanent things." (Readers of conservative literary critic and social philosopher Russell Kirk will recognize the phrase.) He enlists the thought and works of Plato and Aristotle, of Augustine and Aquinas, of G.K. Chesterton, [contemporary Thomist] Josef Pieper, and C.S. Lewis. Allow me to quote from the book's Conclusion:

"I wanted to suggest that anyone with some diligence and some good fortune can find his way to the highest things even if such higher level concerns are not formally or systematically treated in the schools, even if they are in fact denied there or by our own friends or culture. Indeed, I would suspect that there is a certain basic loneliness in our relationships to the highest things. I am not a skeptic here, but we should not expect too much from our formal educational institutions in this regard."

Can I get an "Amen"?

If nothing else, considering Fr. Schall's lists of books that matter may prompt each reader to ask, while scanning the surrounding array of books, "Which books most shape my thought? How would I introduce them to others?" Fr. Schall provides a wonderfeul model of how to do that.

To begin with, any book which, in its preface, seamlessly links Eric Voegelin, E. F. Schumacher, and Mad Magazine deserves attention. James V. Schall has written a delightfully odd, but profound book (in fact, "Oddness and Sanity" is the title of one of his essays) for folks like me who got all the way through college without managing to get "educated" (and digging into the difference between the two is only one of the book's many virtues).

The whimsical subtitle captures the essence of the book perfectly: 'Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found'.

The book contains 21 thoughtful (and thought-provoking) essays on an eclectic range of topics. From my own experience, though, the best feature of this book is the book lists at the end of each essay - 37 lists in all, composed of 290 books (not accounting for titles appearing in multiple lists). I consciously took Schall's advice on maybe a dozen books or so, but in reviewing it recently, I was surprised at how many more I've read since then. One could do a lot worse than following Schall's advice.

Not just a catalogue of books, but a guide to help students (whether in school or in the real world) **recall** that education (and, indeed, human existence itself) has a higher purpose.

One could spend a life-time chasing down Fr. Schall's lists and reading them; you regain that life-time when you apprehend what the book is trying to tell you (and why Schall put it on his list in the first place).

Superb work, and unequalled as an originating impetus for pursuing the life of enquiry and the love of wisdom.

Are you conservative? Are you religious in the Christian Catholic way? Then this book is for you. I mean this in a wonderful way. Even if you didn't answer yes to both questions you will find this book valuable. The title says it all so no more description is necessary.

One great thing it did for me was to clarify my thinking and point me in the right direction of what I should be learning about, what is really important to spend my time learning about. Ever walk into Barnes & Nobel and feel confused and overwhelmed by this question, "Good heavens, what book and I gonna buy now because their are so darn many ones to pick from?" This book will answer that question for you.

I savored every word on every page as I read through this book. Then I went to my Amazon.com account and added virtually every bood he suggested to my 'wish list', yes all 200+ of them. Then I ranked them according to my interest and started builing myself a serious conservative, classic library in our home. It will take me years to buy all of them and even longer to read them all - but I'm detrminded!

A book that I wish was better known. Unlike the most modern books that are meant primarily as entertainment this book harkens back to the day when books were rare and cherished and thought about word for word. You could spend a long time thinking about the ideas in the book. I especially like the chapter "On the Difficulty of Believing and Not Believing" since I have so much trouble believing. Along the same vein I like that Schall isn't preaching here - his goal is not a conclusion but a process - he wants you to think. Really a nice handbook to philosophy and thinking.

Not too long ago a friend asked me, "Do you really think it is worth teaching your students all the history and philosophy stuff? Shouldn't they just learn science and math to get a job and make money?" He has a point. If we are to be strictly robotic producers and insatiable consumers in a capitalistic society, that may be true. But to be truly utilitarian about it, not to mention human, he is flatly mistaken. We are not soldier ants or drone bees. We are not defined by what we make and consume. We call the humanities "humanities" because, at their best, they help humanize us by allowing us to enter into dialogue with the past to inform us about who we are as humans. This book seeks to do the same.

One of the reasons that I like to write so many reviews on amazon is because it serves as something of a mental map of my inner life. Until the birth of my children I marked the passing of time by thinking, "Oh, yeah, that was when I was reading such and such" rather than dates. Some people remember eras by music, who they dated or what job they had. For me, it is what books I was reading. I have also often toyed with the idea of writing a book about the best and worst books that I have read as a short eulogy for each on its way out of the home, on the premise that my wife was forcing me to get rid of them to make room for our children. Maybe I still will. Anyway, the reason I write this is because I image that James Schall may be the same way. This wonderful book of his is akin to a road map of the mind through the lens of various authors that have moved him in a particularly strong direction, like strong winds in the sails of a ship on the ocean.

Believing that education is not to be left to schools, he suggests that we all need to sit down sometime with people in the past who have asked the right questions and thought through various answers, something which, if you are educated in the humanities like myself, you may have missed somehow in college! I may be wrong, but I think Samuel Clemens remarked something to the effect of "I never let school get in the way of my education." How true. College is usually a money racket that almost by its corrupt nature doesn't want you to question the fundamental premises of a society that has drifted so far away from any center that truly holds. By wrestling with the Ultimate Questions, Schall invites us into the inner journey of a lifetime, a quest to be frankly honest about what it means to exist at all.

Use the "look inside" function to get an idea of how he arranges his roadmap. A very odd book in that it is so unique. I may just use this as a textbook for my future students.

James V. Schall's Another Sort of Learning is a books of essays, "contrary essays" it claims in a subtitle too long to type and too fun to read aloud, about reading, studying, teaching, longing, thinking, evil, sanity, values, lectures, devotion, prayer, sports, and a few other things. Easily, Schall could have entitled his book "On Everything" if only Hilaire Belloc had not used that one for a book of essays in 1909.

The book begins with a quotation from Mad Magazine, and ends with a reference to Aristotle. In between the end-pages you will repeatedly encounter names such as Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Russell Kirk, Augustine, Plato, Machiavelli, Josef Pieper, Eric Voegelin, Thomas Aquinas, Flannery O'Connor, Stanley Jaki, John Henry Newman, Dorothy Sayers, and Maurice Baring. It is a book largely about reading and thinking.

What keeps one going back to the book, if not only to reread the essays, is to consult the book lists. Part of the beautiful subtitle states "Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found". Each chapter contains at least one delightful book list; and then there is the bibliography. You will find "Eight Books on Evil and Suffering", "Five Books Addressed to the Heart of Things", "Sixteen Books on Belief and Disbelief", "Eight Collections of Essays and Letters Not To Be Missed", and so on.

It is easily read, in any chapter order, and at any speed. It is a perfect start to a journey in worthwhile books. Schall's Another Sort of Learning is "Not To Be Missed".

Over the past three years, including (and in spite of!) the latter half of my studies at Brandeis University, this book lit a flame hot enough to incinerate my rotting agnosticism and send me whirling towards Roman Catholicism in a flurry of ashes. How?

Well, rather than address any specifics inside the book, I merely want to say that during this period at Brandeis I quickly became a bibliophile while working as a book-shelver at the university library. Not only did I resolve to begin collecting my own library, but I also resolved never to purchase softcover books when hardcover--or even fine leather--versions existed for a reasonable price. My records show that I acquired a hardcover copy of Another Sort of Learning on May 29, 2008 for the sum of $10, at the close of my academic year as a Junior.

When the book arrived, it had traits that I could only compare with one other book on my shelves at the time: That Eager Zest: First Discoveries in the Magic World of Books, edited by Frances Walsh. These traits were: cotton case bindings in an unusually playful color, nearly identical type and font settings on fine, odor-free cream paper, and quite wise essays written with childlike wonder and glee. They are among the most readable books I own, and the elegance of their physical structure has everything to do with it--they are so pleasing to hold that they cast nearby softcover books into oblivion.

Though I had hardly read much in either of them, the publishers evidently wanted these particular editions to be lavished with their reader's attention. With regard to Another Sort of Learning, I am especially glad they did, because without these physical adornments I might not have returned with such "eager zest" to this book which I had at first found impenetrable.

I am not exaggerating when I say that none of the authors recommended or written about in the book were familiar to me. It took me many false starts before I began to comprehend why the likes of E. F. Schumacher, G. K. Chesterton, Josef Pieper, Allan Bloom, Plato, C. S. Lewis, and many others, warranted my utmost attention, and it will take many more just to survey all the gold in this enormous goldmine.

Another Sort of Learning is itself a brilliant guide for the perplexed, and I can only hope this volume finds its way to fellow individuals willing to concede perplexity, because it is a massive dose of truth for those who may not know that they are wrong about the most important things, or, as was in my case, did not yet even know what they were. This is a fountainhead of real philosophy, for the love of wisdom, following the truth where the truth leads, in order to secure the proper convictions for the most pressing questions of mortal and immortal life.

Schall is a great essayist: his goal is to lead modern men and women away from the shallowness and relatavism of the modern education system, where the prescribed mantra is "your truth is not my truth and my truth is not your truth". This book is about being a cultured human being, about being a proud inheritor of the greatest civilisation the world has known -the civilisation wrought through the power of the gospel, namely western civilisation. This book is about everything which contributes to this great culture. That being said, it lacks any serious discussion of music and arts, foundation stones of western civilisation. Leaving that aside, I highly recommend this hook; each chapter ends with some fine book recommendations, books no longer fashionable but key to understanding our culture.