The world is a tough place; we are greeted into it by a slap on the fanny, and our first statement is a cry.

We've all learned a lot since we were born: a slice of it we even picked up in school, and a splinter of that in classes, but most of our hardest learning we did long before we knew that there were such things as schools and teachers: we learned to get up off our bellies, to walk, and to talk; we learned that there were people we could trust and those we couldn't. We learned to ask questions and to expand our understanding with our questions: to enlarge our worlds with our minds.

All little kids know how to do that: give a baby a new toy -- she pokes, strokes, yanks, nibbles, tastes, and shakes it; listens to it, turns it upside down and inside out, bounces it off the floor, pulls it apart, and finds ways to use it that you never thought possible.... And in the process, she learns what it is and what she can do with it. But watch the parents -- they try to curb these excursions by demonstrating to the poor kid what she should do with it -- almost always stressing, simultaneously, its name and its proper uses. Unfortunately parents and child are working at cross purposes: the parents at teaching -- by labeling and limiting -- and the child at learning -- by exploring and opening new territory. Despite the conventional belief that age and experience produce wisdom; here the child is right... and much wiser than the parent.

Then comes school, and we are pushed to answer other people's questions which become more important than ours, and we are switched off the track to wisdom and independence and onto the track to compliance and dependence.

Like many parents, schools too often obstruct education: they are in the teaching -- not the learning -- business, choking off true learning by insisting on teaching labels and chasing students to come up with correct answers ... dooming young people to lives of what Henry David Thoreau called "quiet desperation." For it is not students' answers that lead to learning; it's their questions -- the thirst to know what makes things tick.

Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein knew that and gloried in pulling things apart and putting them together in ways that tickled them and led them to understanding. And so once did you.... You, too, thirsted -- before your parents and teachers taught you otherwise and pushed you toward the adult world and the search for the right answers -- other people's answers. If growing up means settling for other people's answers, let's all join Peter Pan's band and refuse to grow up.

Thoreau said that

"[Students] should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practiced but the art of life; to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemestry, and not to learn how bread is made, or mechanics, and not know how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of the month, -- the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this -- or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?...."

Beware of the people who have fixed answers to arguable questions -- who try to push their answers on you. These criers after unity, the homogenizers, forget that diversity breeds strength. The broader our range of interests and experiences, the stronger we become and the more able we are to deal with whatever comes our way. The more different kinds of people we come to know the more we can know about ourselves. These answer- bringers are the same people who were certain that the world was flat, that bleeding was the all purpose cure for illness, that the earth was the center of the universe. They have given us holy wars and totalitarianisms of the right and the left, genocide and apartied, and even now they take us to the edge of pandemonium.

Recognize that we are all different -- value the differences. For it is only by encouraging individuals to be different that we maintain our vitality -- and our unity. At School Without Walls we have tried to help you find the sense of yourself, to help you develop the strength and ability to use the tools you acquired here: excellence, integrity, civility, responsibility, initiative, self-discipline, humor, and beyond all else the questions you ask. Use them to carve out your spot. But be careful! When you ask someone "What should I do?" or "How should I do it?", they will tell you! And what they tell you may not be what you want to hear. I hope that you have learned how to ask yourself what you want to do and how you can find ways to accomplish tasks without having to depend on authority figures. They have their ways, and those ways generally restrict your options rather than broadening them. The nature of the questions you ask -- of yourself and of others -- will establish the critical limitations that you will face.

Ask why before you ask how to... -- ask yourself before you ask others -- know where you want to go and what you want to see and do before you plot a course; and if you just want to see what's out there, that's OK, but know that that is what you are doing before you set out, and while you're wandering, be prepared to see what's around you and to stop and get it fully. Keep your senses open: see, hear, touch, taste, feel -- but above all keep your minds open. Find connections, see ironies, get the jokes.

Thoreau's watchwords were "Simplify, simplify, simplify!", but he was talking about simplifying the details of our lives not our ideas, for Henry was no fool -- he recognized that complexity was the fact of nature, and that there are no simple solutions to complex problems -- no easy answers.

What Thoreau discovered in his two years at Walden Pond holds true for us today, so let me give him the last word. He said,

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endevors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Lewis M. Marks