It's usually thought that people don't grow because they just don't give a damn. But maybe we should question this assumption. We should remember that people are still taught that at the age of 21 they are now "adults", and for most of them this means that future self-improvement ought merely to be of a narrow, technical sort — like getting a law degree. This is of course absurd. Anybody who puts too much emphasis on getting high marks and sheepskins invites this silent dogma to become a roadblock towards seeing any bigger picture of themselves. At best they'll have to bail out and rethink lots of stuff they took for granted, a process that may well start out quite painfully and involve severe social dislocations. At worst they'll end up as stuffed shirts who profess to seek the truth yet end up talking, as Will Durant used to say, "more and more about less and less".

A century ago, when a girl went to a "finishing school", she learned to balance books on her head and her growth was finished. It took an especially rebellious or heretical young woman to break out of this prison. Most couldn't. They preferred to stay within the protective walls of socially sanctioned infantilization. As Mark Van Doren noted, many of his students weren't interested in liberal education (learning to be free) because they were in too much of a rush to become something less than men.

People at the age of, say, thirty who find they need to drop back and punt will suspect there's something wrong with them. Perhaps a "tragic flaw" about which nothing can be done. If they have no faith in their ability to manage their own problems they will turn themselves over to the nearest shrink, who will cheerfully corroborate their worst fears and induct them into a neverending program of what we could well call "enhanced infantilization." By this time it has become too difficult to be honest about their sense of being incomplete, of being at sea, of being lost. So instead they cover up their emptiness with hedonistic excess and pointless vanity so that at least the neighbors won't talk. When the next generation comes along, it will have to discover all over again that the emperor has no clothes. This model of social progress is too slow for my money.

It's only when people come out from under the thumb of tyrannical and dogmatic schoolteachers and shrinks — and the twisted social systems which breed them — that they can begin to grow. Everything up till then will have been etiquette training and rote memorization. Now they'll have to engage interesting, and more difficult, questions for which no "adult" has ever prepared them. Questions such as "What should I learn now since I realize I know nothing important?" Or, "To where exactly can I turn in this dark hour? Must I repeatedly acquiesce to ancient superstitions? Must I assume I'm 'sick'? Can I learn anything from groups or movements active today? What about learning from discussing the history of ideas?" By this time they realize keenly that if all they ever learn is what society wants them to do and think they'll end up as something less than men.

In some ways the very idea that you need teachers and leaders to figure life out flies in the face of reality. Take language acquisition, for example, which occurs before the educational prison systems incarcerate you. It's true that parents give you language, yet oddly enough they don't actually teach it.

A boy comes home from school and says, "Mom, I ain't got no money."

"Is that English?", she says, frowning.

The boy thinks for a minute and says, meekly, "Well, anyway, I don't have any money."

"Then go take a dollar out of my purse," she says, with a smile.

She hasn't taught him anything. In fact in many cases she will have no idea how to express the grammatical rules she wants him to use. He has to figure out the right answer himself, either from previous experience or simple trial and error. The mind of a child is like a very advanced computer which can reprogram itself when it is chided by its human master. Imagine a hand-held device that can redesign a spreadsheet all by itself based on a mere verbal pout on your part, or can rewrite Wikipedia articles on the fly to suit the comprehension level of your 8-year-old daughter.

The only kind of knowledge that can serve the needs of a living, breathing civilization is one that is itself living and breathing. And we each must make individual contributions to this grand project to keep the planet on course. Otherwise we'll end up parroting the incomplete insights that seemed adequate half a century ago and which still fill our textbooks and libraries, but which now seem weak and hollow to anyone who can see what's going on around him. We will waste yet another generation as children playing on the seashore, finding only ordinary shells, and never coming to suspect that a great ocean of truth lies all undiscovered before us. "A democracy that is interested in its future will give each of its members as much liberal education as he can take, nor will it let him elect to miss that much because he is in a hurry to become something less than a man." [Liberal Education, Chapter 3, "Education for All"].

Van Doren preferred to exemplify freedom rather than to explain it. He would ask new students why they thought he had chosen the books he had assigned for them to read first. They all came up with elaborate and highly sophisticated explanations to show off what finished products they already were. Then he would put up his hand and give them the right answer: "Because they're my favorite books."

Not everything can be figured out in your head, it turns out. Sometimes experience is the best teacher.