Seems like only yesterday when someone hauled my scrawny mind to the first grade, singing “School days, school days, dear old Golden Rule days…” That’s when we all got our first Coca-Cola ruler with the Golden Rule written on it. Not only was I exposed to “reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic”, but learning how to do unto others as you would want others to do unto you. Radical thought.
Education is risky business. Remember the adage “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”; the converse of that oversimplification might also apply. The process of learning is like a trek in the wilderness or like exploring unknown regions of questions we never thought about. When we discover the history of ideas or the intricacies of science or the imagination of math, our world grows larger and the landscapes of our lives take on new shapes. Education takes the idle mind, or the addle mind, or perhaps the most difficult of all, the narrow mind, and cultivates curiosity. And we all know what that did to the proverbial cat!
At the heart of it, the scriptures tell of humankind learning: learning the Torah, or the Wisdom, or listening to the parables of a rabbi from Nazareth who was dead set on teaching folk about the wonders of God’ s love and the responsibilities we are to enjoy in this Kingdom in the midst of us. It was marvelous, of course, his teaching. Too much so. Too good to be true. Too close to home. Too risky.
“Teacher”, asked one of his hearers, “What must I do to have eternal life? ” And the teacher offered a course on Golden Rule type neighborly love through a simple parable. The problem was that too many people found Samaritans [today he might just as well say Palestinians or immigrants] so offensive that they dropped out of the course and tried to figure out ways to discredit the rabbi or to shut down his roving schoolhouse. It wasn’t that he was teaching anything new, or talking out of school; he was reminding them of the stuff in their own book, which obviously they had failed to understand. They got mad as hell at him one day for his including non-Jews in his lessons that they threatened to hurl him off the nearest cliff.
At the end of Deuteronomy, Moses wraps up his teaching career with the children of Israel with a beautiful image: “May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distills as the dew, as the gentle rain upon the tender grass, and as the showers upon the herb.” When we open ourselves to the possibilities of daring to be well-educated people, our parched minds and souls can grow some of the most outlandish things, especially some wild thoughts about ourselves and this world in which we live. We might even learn at last to love God with all our minds and our neighbors as ourselves. Or the Golden Rule. Education is risky business. But so is living.
