Perpetual Education

Another fantastic column by David Brooks - "The Other Education" on how Bruce Springsteen (yes, the rock star) educated him!!

"Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.
But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.
We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.
In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.
This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.
The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.
From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.
Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning."

The power of emotional education is immense and it is what drives us, thrives the intellect in us and makes us what we are. Social sciences is all about these knowledge epidemic diverging according to the culture and geography, in-turn shaping our morals and values.
I personally sucked at the higher education but came out unscathed on both fronts. The spell outside the classroom during the college days taught me more about life and assembled me better to face the vagaries of life. Knowledge oozes all around us from unlikely sources - music, books, nature, witty lines from movies, TV shows, a cabbie, chit chat with a friend, a stranger and of-course there are always going to people who despise us but we still can learn a lesson from them on why not to despise or probably how not to live. These list can go on and on. Universe has been offering us a perpetual education, its up to us to heed for our own good and the society. If not completely, we are partly self-centered creatures and the benefits of this "other" education must be blatantly self-evident. The other education in the "air" helps create "Somatic Markers" and fine tune the existing ones (in the process improve our rationale). In others words, a reductionist statement - fine tunes our gut feelings. The phenomena of neuroplasticity is a toddler nurtured by this education.

The story of Ekalavya in the Indian epic Mahabharata juxtaposes the importance of a third kind of education, self-education. A prefect amalgam of these three education will quench the thirst of our soul.