The Freedom to Learn – Sunday, January 12, 1986
Ours is the age of freedoms: Freedoms from want and fear, freedom of religion, of social rights, and civil liberties.
But there is one liberty unlisted among the basic freedoms outlined in the constitution we must also cherish. It is a subtle freedom, a common but sometimes unexercised freedom, a freedom upon which all other liberties are dependent. It is the freedom to learn, the God-given right to search, to ask questions and expect answers, to study what we want, where and when we want, to read whatever anyone has had the audacity to print, to arrive at our own conclusions after sifting the evidence, to combine experience and intuition. This is the right to Learn.
But the freedom to learn does not guarantee the acquisition of knowledge, for learning is not a passive liberty but an active pursuit. This freedom is a two-wheeled vehicle. Here, the right is useless without the responsibility. Simply being free is not enough. He or she who would learn must actively follow truth wherever it leads, must exhaust the possibilities, examine the evidence, must make study a lifelong pursuit.
We are fortunate to live at a time when learning is so accessible. Nearly every small town has its library; public education is now a hard-won reality; adult education classes are available to almost everyone; and leisure and affluence have provided time for learning.
But, despite all this freedom to learn, despite all these resources, we many times neglect to exercise this fundamental right. Books collect dust in our libraries; adult classes are cancelled for lack of participation; some students work harder at skipping class than what it would take to learn the subject; and, in our homes, we most often reject challenging study in favor of passive entertainment. One author described it as “amusing ourselves to death.”1
He who fails to exercise the freedom to learn is at once slave and slaveholder, for he shackles himself. When we stop learning, stop seeking knowledge, stifle our curiosity with excessive amusement, then bondage begins. Gradually, unperceptively, as youth gives way to middle age and maturity, many of us lose this priceless freedom. Happy in our lethargy, secure in our passive and unchallenging existence, we graze contentedly, enclosed by high fences of ignorance and superstition.
To keep oneself free to learn: that is growth; that is happiness; that is life.
1 Postman, Neil, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” New York University
January 12, 1986
Broadcast Number 2,943