Hayes starts with a seemingly simple and apparently inarguable premise: that our older citizens represent a potentially invaluable resource and civilizing influence. We (I'm a few years past fifty myself, so I'll include myself in that group) have had plenty of time to understand the errors of our earlier years, and to develop a sense of how our society can and should be. Given our numbers and our experience, Hayes makes clear that we can become a major force for improving society as a whole. Perhaps we even have a moral obligation to return what we spent our earlier lives receiving from society. The role of village elder can't exist in a technological, twenty-first century culture, but our strengths, values, and experience still have all the worth they ever did. In order to make them effective in today's world, Hayes proposes a program of lifelong learning, tailored to and conducted by the lifelong students themselves. That university without walls he calls September University - and it seems remarkably close in spirit to the original colleges that nucleated around like-minded scholars as Europe's Dark Ages started to brighten.
I found this book more thought-provoking than any I've read in ages. Those thoughts lie about evenly balanced between agreement and thorough disagreement. I agree fully adults of all ages should develop their minds, not just to better serve society as a whole but for the simple pleasure of expanding one's horizons. Hayes might have missed an equally important reason for older generations to continue learning. In order to work effectively with the generations twenty years younger, or forty, or more, they must be approached on their own terms. They won't come to us, so we need to keep ourselves relevant to cultures quite unlike those in which we spent our formative years. I fully agree with the value of self-teaching, something I find compulsory in my high-tech career, research, and teaching responsibilities. Hayes argues for self-teaching partly to mitigate the damage caused by public education, something I can attest to in my own life. My enjoyment of poetry, for example, died a horrible death at the hands of public school teachers; it remains dead to this day, and I expect that "education" to remain with me forever.
I can not agree with all parts of Hayes's prescription for adult learning, however. I believe firmly in the value of formal schooling, and prove that in my own life. I completed my doctorate in computer systems engineering just a few weeks short of my fiftieth birthday, and found my wide experience a real asset in addressing problems that spanned computational chemistry, computer circuit design, bioinformatics, and software engineering. I have taught graduate-level courses to working adults for most of the last decade. I find huge reason to self-educate, but also find that self-teaching tends towards gaps that a formal program would never have left open. Formal education has a place that Hayes seems to underestimate. (He also seems to misunderstand the role of a research university, when discussing what universities could and should do for adult education.)
Hayes specifically calls out psychology, sociology, anthropology, comparative religion, and other "soft" studies as those most essential to the mature mind's effectiveness. Although I see value in those fields for the purposes that Hayes proposes, I find his argument one-sided and somewhat inconsistent. He does not address people who, like me, have personal predilections for other fields. Likewise, he disregards completely the technical knowledge needed for rational, informed discussion of so many social issues in a technological society. Some of today's biggest debates in social policy center on climate change, nuclear power, privacy in a wired world, biotechnology, response to drug-resistant diseases, and other topics that require knowledge of technical facts and of the scientific process. I find a discouraging tendency for discussion of these fast-changing issues to be dominated by errors ranging from factual misunderstandings to active programs of disinformation. The informed public assumed by democratic ideals must be informed about these subjects far better than they are now - not just the subjects that Hayes prescribes. Then, as part working toward the ideals that Hayes seeks, he proposes that the soft fields on his list take a more prominent position in public education: the same public education that he excoriated just a few pages earlier. I assure you that, if I were taught those things by the public school teachers that taught me literature and social studies, the result would be an abhorrence directly opposite the result that Hayes hopes for.
I agree with the value of many of Hayes's goals. He suggests many ways for mature minds to involve themselves in current culture, including things like writing reviews! (I had to smile at that suggestion, since I've published over two thousand at Amazon.) Properly done, this would benefit society as a whole, and offer great satisfaction to the students in Hayes's school for the self-taught. For all the good in his suggestions, I still find that they skip over many of the issues that most need addressing and many of the people that would be needed to address them.
- wiredwierd
