In discussions with Professor Gabriel Gudding and the brilliant and charming young people of Tuesday and Thursday’s two o’clock English 100 class, I have developed a revolutionary theory of learning that, as you soon be privileged to see, contains the secrets to a scholar’s education and happiness. You see, the reason this group of thinkers learns so well is that they ask questions without expecting to immediately be given an answer. Oh, you say, how can they call their process one of learning when it does not result in any answers! But, dear readers, that is precisely the genius behind their approach! These brilliant and charming young people approach education from a point of view that one might consider very advanced for their years. Keen observer that I am, I’ve noticed that these students believe that education is about more than learning facts from the material before them. Their experiences in life and school have already taught them that education is about learning how to ask questions and living these questions in order to discover the answers on a personal level. These clever students respect themselves too much to accept the facts, ideas, and theories presented to them by teachers with blind faith. Dear readers, the most enlightened among you, or should I say, those among you most similar to myself, will eventually realize that anything you learn with blind faith is too far detached from the realm of human experience to be worth learning at all. To a degree further than any other class I’ve ever been in, the English 100 class embraces learning as a lifestyle, understanding that this process of education through questioning can ebb from the classroom and cascade into all the attitudes they have concerning how people should think, feel, communicate, treat one another—or more simply, how people should live. These secrets that I have deemed appropriate to share with you are ones that you will be grateful for receiving as you find them very beneficial in your quest to let learning radiate out from you and your divorce of the old and tired doctrine that you should let learning be absorbed into yourself.
-Mary Beth Ryan
