Mike Vargo: Getting Smart About Education

There was a time when my friends and I measured progress in life by the size of our biceps. We were teenagers then, years ago, in a steel-mill town outside Pittsburgh. And it wasn’t any stereotypical brawny blue-collar ethos that led us to think that way. It was something else.

Subjects of great interest to us were (a) girls and (b) cars. We were in the process of learning our way around both, and having much more success with the cars. Simple logic told us that learning to drive shouldn’t be hard. Vastly more people could drive than could do calculus. Still, it involved controlling a deadly machine in unpredictable moving environments. You had to start by practicing in an empty lot, as I did, with my dad in the passenger seat of our family’s massive old, chrome-encrusted, two-tone (baby blue and white) sedan. Dad was relaxed and easy while I wheeled the mammoth relic around on the concrete and cinders of a sprawling lot at the edge of town. The terrain contained nothing to hit. 

Doing it in traffic was another story. This required more than just the next level of hand-eye coordination. You had to find your groove in terms of whole-body coordination — remember, a car has foot pedals, which perform very different but equally vital functions — while watching in what felt like every direction at once, and linking that up with what you did with the wheel and pedals, to make the baby-blue boat sail through empty spaces rather than spaces currently occupied. All while your dad was now emanating jitters, if not voicing them aloud, which cranked your heebie-jeebies to the point where you could feel your anal sphincter contracting and your temples sweating. 

But gradually, before too long, you caught the knack. More or less. Just enough to white-knuckle through the license test. Which meant permission, sometimes, to take the car out on your own, provided you promised not to do several stupid things. Including the one your mom remembered and shouted, right as you hustled out the door with the keys. Nonetheless: Look, I’m driving a car! 

Meanwhile the girl business was still early-stage. It seemed far tougher to learn to interact successfully with sentient beings who spoke the same language as oneself, and sat in the same Social Studies class — and who yet, in certain ways, were as different from oneself as the brake pedal is from the gas pedal. 

So the smart thing was to start from known information and proceed logically. Talking and clowning around with girls was no problem. Doing schoolwork and other work together, no problem. The problem was one of gravitational physics: attraction and repulsion of physical bodies. We reasoned, flawlessly, that in order to generate attraction, we had to make ourselves attractive. Which led to the biceps. 

Wait, you might say: biceps are only part of the body. True, but a highly visible part in warm weather, when they flashed below the sleeves of your t-shirt. Also, these muscles played important roles in attraction opportunities. When you curled your right arm to raise a cigarette to your lips, the biceps contracted naturally, and you wanted it to pop real nice. Like an exclamation point on the suggestive gesture. 

And the left arm was the arm that you draped out of the open driver’s window, arranging it attractively against the outside of the car door when you were driving. When the fact that you had a car was an attraction, too. Here was a double opportunity, and it wouldn’t look right unless the arm was right. You wanted the arm to be cocked somewhat but not flexed. Deliberate flexing, when you don’t need to use the muscle, is noticeable, and we saw it as the mark of a man unsure of himself. Ideally the arm would be loose enough to let your fingers drum a tune on the door along with the radio. An arm with a properly articulated biceps, even when loose, showed the world that you knew what the fuck you were doing. 

For a while, maybe months, we were obsessed with biceps. Worked them out. Gauged progress, by circumference, with tape measures snuck from the sewing kits of mothers. A couple of guys who were already well-built got builter. I was thin and got slightly less thin. 

What none of us got was more success with girls. That would come later, to varying degrees, after experiments in realms other than biceps. Until then, the arm strength helped when you had to jack up a car and change a tire.  

**

Skip ahead fifteen or twenty years. I had left the mill town and become a college-educated professional. For exercise I joined a gym where the weight room happened to be popular with bodybuilders: men who flexed and posed on purpose, onstage, to win prizes. 

The weight room had curl benches, the kind where you can brace your arm and pull a weight toward you to grow your biceps. One day I watched a bodybuilder sit at a bench holding a huge dumbbell, while his friend stood by teaching him a trick he’d learned. It was a new way to do a curl. The intricacies were beyond me, but the teacher was gesturing at the curl bench and pointing to particular regions of his own immense biceps. Apparently the idea was to build aspects of the muscle that would further impress the judges when you posed. The man at the bench tried the new technique. Then he looked up at his friend: “It does feel different.”

“See what I mean?”

“But here’s the question. Will it work?”

“Hey,” the teacher laughed. “Anything works if you let it.”

**

Today, after more decades have passed, my memory keeps flashing back to that scene. “Anything works if you let it”? The sentence echoes in my mind’s ear like a recurring mantra, a message to be heeded … despite the fact that it’s not strictly true. Some approaches to some tasks don’t work at all: Injecting bleach does not cure Covid, and beating a dog won’t make a good dog. Some are clearly superior to others: Market economies and mixed economies, though imperfect, work better than central planning.  

The mantra also seems out of tune with a major modern trend. Digital technology has fueled a data-driven urge to find the best (if only marginally best) methods of doing nearly everything. Analysts churn data to determine how farmers can manage their crops better, which treatments work best for which cancers, and how companies should market their goods to you. The goods include sleep apps that monitor your movements at night to help you sleep more efficiently. 

Moreover we’ve been seeing much inquiry into, and debate over, the best methods for teaching and learning. Are children more likely to grow into STEM wizards if they learn with Singapore math or Saxon math? Will they learn to read better if they’re taught by phonics, the whole-language method, or balanced literacy? 

And recent times have brought a focus on imparting a skill that’s deemed broadly useful, critical thinking. This is the ability to weigh evidence and arguments rationally. Done well, it equips you to break through biased assumptions, thereby arriving at sound judgments. Of course we have methods for teaching the method. Notably, critical thinking is promoted as a selling point of “classical” K-12 schools, where education is grounded in traditional building blocks of Western culture, from Socratic dialogue to the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. As one U.S. school claims on its website, “The classical approach leverages ancient, time-proven techniques to develop lifelong learners who are able to think critically.” 

Sounds good, except that this is one of many cases where I hear the “Anything works” mantra whispering in my head. I think that in many areas of life, we could use less attention to method and more to the spirit in which things are done. Any economy can be corrupt and cruel if people are. And nothing can be learned or practiced well without the desire to do so. 

Our country urgently needs more critical thinking. Efforts to teach the how-to should be applauded. But my observations of fellow citizens, combined with reflection on misjudgments I have made, suggest that the main problem is not a lack of how-to. What’s usually missing is want-to.

If you don’t want to think critically, you won’t. You will cheat when you think, re-routing your trains of thought to arrive at your favorite conclusions. Or, you will find that thinking feels difficult and stressful — similar to how driving in traffic feels, at first — and you’ll stop thinking when it starts to hurt. The cheating and stopping can be observed even in people who hold thinking licenses, i.e., diplomas and degrees. These people are certified as competent, street-legal thinkers, but they don’t operate as such. Which is too bad because thinking works if you let it. 

**

In my hometown boyhood days, I was known as the smart kid. I did spectacularly well in school, from first grade on up. Actually I don’t believe I was any more “intelligent” than my young pals who went on to careers such as steelworker, bartender, and mechanic. I understood some things they didn’t and vice versa. I was quick at mental math; some kids were quicker on the uptake in social situations or better at cooling down a dispute.   

The separating factor was that I outshined them all at school. Here again I think it was a matter of wanting to, which I picked up from my parents. Meeting them, you might never have guessed that each had dropped out of school when young, in order to work. They spoke precisely, without street slang or cussing. They showed curiosity about the wider world (family outings were often trips to historical and educational sites), and they were frequent learners. Dad, a laborer on a railroad track gang, eventually studied his way up to a complex job running a signal tower. Mom chafed at being just a housewife, so she learned to cut hair on the side and to take on various part-time roles that expanded her domain. 

Since we didn’t have much money, making more was a motivation for learning. However it wasn’t the only or ultimate reason. Mom, a sly punster, used to call material goods “the trappings” — nice to have but they would trap you if you didn’t watch out. The reason for learning was to live fully, like a human instead of a survival machine. My parents took correspondence courses, read and discussed the news, and taught me to read very early (by methods I can’t recall). Together they created an aura that we children absorbed, an aura in which good vibes came from learning new stuff. 

And to me, school was the perfect place for that. I loved it. School was like a game show. They’d ask questions and I wanted to know the answers. Helium! Booker T. Washington! Magna Carta, 1215, e=mc² and c is an extremely large number! School had cool adults —  teachers who surprised you with how much they knew — and better yet, school was a smorgasbord. You sampled different subjects every hour, with the lineup changing and extracurriculars added every year. What could be more fun?

So I graduated as our high school’s valedictorian. And if the rest of life were like high school, I could have aced it, but it wasn’t. My schoolboy success had come at a cost. I had wound up with an oddly developed mind, the mental equivalent of a bodybuilder’s physique. That mind was honed to display awesome ripples of intellect in term papers, flex mightily on standardized tests, and win prizes. Trouble lurked in the areas left under-developed. Although “common sense” is a vague term, it’s safe to say I had little. And little sense of myself and the world and how the two might fit. 

**

After graduation, long story short, mistakes accumulated. Having chosen the wrong major at the wrong college, I burned a scholarship to get a degree that looked practical, but in a field I was utterly unsuited for. Then came some hectic years of false starts in other fields and grinding at menial jobs for income, amid self-created personal turmoil. 

Finally, almost by chance, I became a journalist and nonfiction writer. Tried a few simple stories for a small weekly paper, work that felt like the research-based writing I’d enjoyed in school. Then, with support from people close to me, plus the guidance of kindly editors, I moved up the ladder step by step. This good fortune enabled me to learn the trade by an ancient, time-proven technique: to learn by doing as I went along.  

Today I am still learning. Including now, while writing this. Last night I talked out a glitch in my thinking with a friend, which helped. Maybe the next so-called teachable moment will help me make the next piece of writing better than this one.

There are so, so many ways to learn, and I’m not referring to modalities of learning, such as visual versus verbal. For example, I can learn from what I did in the past, years ago or minutes ago. I learn a lot from what others do or have done. Poetic types say they learn from the stars, from the wind, from their cats. These ways can work, too. If you let them.

**

And there is so much to learn, about any subject. For instance, about the girl business. I had mentioned that my buddies and I later figured it out. Well, we sort of did. To our amazement we found that getting from first base to full-contact sex was the easy part. Throughout history, vastly more people have had sex than have learned to drive. The difficult part was building and sustaining a relationship, a marriage. 

I learned (and am still learning) that the difference between myself and my wife is exponentially greater than that between the gas and brake pedals. Between oneself and a spouse or partner of any gender, unfathomable multitudes of differences exist. Each person among the current 8 billion is a unique swirl of experiences, perceptions, and quirks. Further, each person keeps changing, due to aging or life stage or whims or whatever. Try to pin down a status quo affinity between I and thou, and you can’t. It’s like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, multiplied to the nth. All you can do is keep approximating. 

**

What do we learn? Do we learn what our life means, what its purpose is? I don’t wish to imply that it has a single meaning or purpose, definable in a sentence. But in each life, hovering behind the facade or maybe in plain sight, something important may await discovery, something that words can only approximate. 

What none of us should want to do is get to the end and think my God, I missed it. Get to the end and realize we spent our days developing physical and mental muscles, and applying them to the tasks of the day, without letting the world show us what the real job was. Get to the end of sitting at the wheel in a succession of vehicles, and driving them on thousands of errands and road trips — and of telling ourselves, in language borrowed from inspirational cliches, that the journey is what matters, not the destination — when in fact the latter does matter. When it would have paid to think more deeply about where we’re going. 

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Mike Vargo is a freelance writer who lives in Pittsburgh.

Copyright 2024 Mike Vargo.