Tag: education

an oil painting showing ancient Athenians debating in the agora

Journal (The doorway to wisdom)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom, as Doctor Mirabilis once said, so over the many years of my school education, I learned, or rather, tried to learn, Russian, German, French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. In the end, I only managed to scrape a smidgen of English, and even this was only after I moved to Scotland as an adult. On the other hand, one could repeat after Anne Dreydel that there’s no point in speaking many languages if you have nothing interesting to say in any of them. And for that, you need something more than just repetition of random facts approved by some Ministry of Education official, which, as Michel de Montaigne rightly noted, only stuffs the memory and leaves the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Since there is no way, for obvious reasons, of joining the bunch following Socrates, the second best I could do was study philosophy at the university, which was my plan if I hadn’t failed my matriculation examination—the maths part, to be precise (my literary essay turned out to be one of the best of the year, so I clearly placed emphasis on the wrong part of my education). I passed it two years later, after leaving the army, but it was too late to pursue the original plan. I had to put on the braces of adulthood and get a job, which was a lesson of a sort. But I never really forgot about it, and from time to time, I tried to study philosophy on my own. The problem was that the books I read either bored me immensely or were too difficult to understand, so at some point, I just gave up.

A few years after coming to Scotland, when I finally managed to achieve a level of English that allowed me to read newspaper articles and technical texts at work with relative ease, I reached for a novel, but it was a total fiasco. And then, by sheer chance, I came across The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno. It was an e-book, so reading it on one of those fancy e-readers with a built-in dictionary that lets you see the definition of a word if you highlight it turned out to be a delight. Following that one, I started searching for more using the phrase “philosophical essays.” Soon after, I also managed to find a few second-hand bookshops with shelves dedicated to philosophy. With every book I read, my appetite increased.

But then, at one point, I reached a limit. It was soon after I finished reading The Essential Plato, with an introduction by Alain de Botton. I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I tried to read it. I really did, but it was just too much. I gave up after about eighty pages. The next failure was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, although this time I persevered and made it two-thirds of the way through the book before giving up. So, now I know my limits and that I’m not going to be a philosopher or a philosophy scholar. But I can still enjoy a book of essays by A. C. Grayling, or the aforementioned Alain de Botton, or even Michel de Montaigne, although Charles Cotton’s seventeenth-century English is not easy to read, probably even for a native speaker.

watercolour with students in front of the historic university building

Journal (Bright but lazy)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

My education is quite a complicated story. Bright but lazy was the general opinion teachers had about me when I was still in primary school. It’s not that I couldn’t have done more in terms of my academic achievements—I learned all of seventh-grade maths in one weekend to prepare for the end-of-year exam, scoring better than the model student in our class—but it just never really interested me. I preferred to immerse myself in the world of literature. At that time, reading books bordered on obsession. The book was the first thing I took in my hands after waking up. I ate while reading, I walked to school with a book in front of my face (I’m still surprised I was never hit by a car), and in class I read with a book on my lap under the desk so the teacher wouldn’t catch me. Books filled the rest of my day after school, and when my parents finally turned off the light in the middle of the night, I stood behind the curtain and read by the light of the street lamp in front of my room window.

This situation continued throughout my entire education, abruptly interrupted when I failed one of my final exams, and instead of going to university to study philosophy, I ended up in the army. I passed the exams eventually after quitting the army, but at that time, the reality of adult life hit, and I had to find a job.

A few years later, after saving some money, I started a part-time study at Jagiellonian University, the oldest and one of the best universities in the country. I studied the cultures of ancient Rome and Greece, but after a year, my finances did not allow me to continue. My father lent me some money, but this time I decided to be more practical and switched to political science with journalism at my local university. It made more sense because, at that time, I was already working for the largest daily newspaper in the region, and half of my colleagues were studying there. Unfortunately, I devote more attention to work than to studies, and I failed the year. And that was it. Only a few years later, I returned to Jagiellonian University to study comparative literature as an aspiring poet, but again, it turned out to be just another one-year stint.

It required hitting the brutal reality of immigrant life and six years of hard work studying while in a full-time job for me to actually get a university degree. But even that wasn’t without some turmoil, as I started in mathematics and statistics just to switch after two years to computer science. But in the end, I finished it. The odd thing is, it stopped having any meaning for me. Perhaps because it happened at the same time as the breakdown of my marriage. But that’s a different story.