The Rational and the Subversive

Still plugging through Zen.  Ran into page 150 earlier today and two adjacent paragraphs hit me with completely opposite effects.  The first:

The real University, he said, has no specific location.  It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues.  The real University is a state of mind.  It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.  It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of he real University.  The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

Most of this sits well with me as it echoes Thoreau in my head.  Tear down the structures, the things of this world that tend to represent thought and intelligence and wonder and yet still I have my mind and in my mind I have the images and feelings associated with those things.  Similarly, tear down the institutions responsible for instilling learning within us, deny them accreditation, do what you will and the process of learning and thinking and growing will still take place.  In this way, great education is not contained within walls anywhere, a sentiment the great thinkers of our race would agree with (Socrates, Twain, Whitman, Hemingway).  It also suggests the idea that teaching is something pretty innate as it contains the sum total of the desire to help another.  In this way it is an expression of ego but also of altruism.

The next part thus:

In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing.  This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address... But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas.  It is not the real University at all.

This discredits learning in a way that contradicts what I see in the first graph.  The narrator/author seems to want to separate the experience of school from learning.  Ok, he has precedent there.  Twain: "I never let schooling interfere with my education."  But the difference, I think, is the belief that learning CAN happen anywhere.  It is not confined to the classroom ("I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately") but neither is it, by definition, mutually exclusive of the classroom.  To defend the first and refute the second is illogical.  University structures may suffer flaws, as all organizations do, but until our culture produces enough roaming Socrates to meet with the masses under the tree of knowledge, then we need organization.  Question the method this learning tradition operates on, sure; but do not demolish its foundation or you remove the argument for learning altogether.