The Road To Somewhere

The Road to Somewhere

Take a minute, and think about the venerable 1980s situation comedy "Cheers" and the opening line to its theme song: "Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got."

Henry Adams did not live to see "Cheers" or television's invention, but it is possible to say his life had a parallel coda to those lyrics. Adams was not different from many high-society New Englanders in the 19th century. Adams was an American aristocrat, the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. Presidents, and attended Harvard College. Adams, however, discusses his time at Harvard with contempt and rancor for the most part. Adams, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography "The Education of Henry Adams" said that Harvard "taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile" (Adams 32). Adams and his classmates in the Class of 1958 did not take school seriously and Harvard was simply a social collective, populated by students, who only attended the school because others they knew did as well. Adams wrote that if "parents went on, generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type" (Adams 39). In Adams' opinion, "the entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in after life" (Adams 36).

Adams did develop the notion that his education would not end with graduation from Harvard, but it required graduate courses from the School of Life to complete it. Adams, the great-grandson and grandson of two U.S. Presidents, keenly understood that his lineage and privilege did not give him everything. True and lasting education is a combination of formal and informal elements, which is the only way to deal with an evolving society. That realization is the hallmark of a true intellectual. Adams knew he could have contempt for the conventions of his formal education and its trappings.

Adams had talent for both the spoken and written word, which helped elect him orator for the Class of 1958. Adams said it was an honor, "so flattering that it actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if possible, had he known that it was the only flattery of the sort he was ever to receive" (Adams 41). Adams' oration reached across the wide ages in attendance. In summation, Adams felt he was "ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe. ... As yet he knew nothing. Education had not yet begun" (Adams 41).

In relation to Adams, I am not a child of privilege, but I share the ideal of self-education as an important tool for enrichment. I started my formal education in 1994 at a prestigious college with much of the same contempt that Adams felt for his time at Harvard.

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