Learning is always the cornerstone of my timeline.

From my earliest school days I was avid to learn. That made school an excellent place for me, though I was always aware that I was an outlier and that other kids, smart, capable, interesting kids, weren’t thriving there. I was happy and successful through almost 18 years of traditional schooling, yet when I had children I seized the opportunity to provide their education myself, at home. There were things about school that I realized weren’t optimal or respectful; and there was the risk that my child might not find the same fit with schooling that I did. I was confident that whether or not my kids might succeed at school, I would definitely be able to help them succeed at home.

Part of the reason I succeeded at school was that I was interested in basically everything (music to dissection to Latin to trigonometry...), so I was always happy and engaged to learn. Those students who didn’t fit would sit through the learning, but they wouldn’t really engage with the learning because it didn’t interest them. (Modern neuroscience research has demonstrated that engagement is crucial for learning to set.) This was an improvement I could make as a homeschooling parent: I could limit the amount of generalized learning to the true necessities and let my kids immerse themselves in what fascinated them.

It took me an annoyingly long time to realize that if it wasn’t respectful or even effective to impose extensive generalized education on specialist learners, it was perhaps just as true that specialized education will be discouraging to generalists. I began to look at the times when I was asked to specialize in a different light. At university, for example, I wasn’t nearly as proficient a learner as in K12, according to my grades and my dissatisfaction. (I also charted coursework for at least twenty different majors before I ran out of time and settled on history.) I was also remarkably thrilled and relieved to have the ability to homeschool my kids rather than lock myself into a single professional path.

To accept myself as a generalist, to abandon self-judgment of that aspect of my identity and dismiss such judgment from others, was a profound shift. I replaced the persistent buzz of inadequacy with appreciation for who I was and what I could offer: a knowledge set that was broad but not shallow, making cross-disciplinary connection and meaning possible. I remembered that “Renaissance Man” is an honorable designation, and that history is full of extraordinary generalists: Aristotle, Seneca, al-Biruni, Avicenna, Hildegard, Maimonides, da Vinci, Galileo, Franklin, Jefferson, Tesla, Schweitzer, Keller, and many others. Though I lay no claim to their heights, I finally understood that I dishonored them if I rejected my own generalism.

How does this lead to Advancing Wisdom?

I’ve talked so far about learning, but the term is imprecise, even simplistic. I want to go beyond learning to understanding. I want to know that something happened, and also why it happened and what the consequences were. Still more, I want to know why it matters: what it offers to me or my community or the world, at this moment or some other moment in time.

Wisdom encompasses all of that. Wisdom expands, maybe even abandons boundaries around what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is shared. It affirms knowledge found through spiritual, cultural, or ancestral paths; it esteems knowledge created through art and ritual, movement and nature; it commends knowledge cultivated with academic research; it cherishes knowledge fostered by the experience of each unique human being. Wisdom encompasses the multiplicity of modes by which knowledge is gained and created. That’s what I want to be a part of.