<p>But now here is the Oxford secret, and it is not the one might have expected to discover. The students who attend Oxford, like those at elite, private American colleges and universities, are the athletes of the academic world. They enter as accomplished young men and women, perhaps compulsively so, as their education has often been designed to impress university admissions officers. But once they get to Oxford, they study only one subject for three or four years (certainly no self-designed majors or any other such colonial licentiousnes!) and rare would be the opportunity to change mid-course. </p>
<p>There were no courses in drama, acting, playwriting, or stage design. Other than for the few specialists, there were no courses in music, either history, appreciation, or applied. No instruction in choral singing. No journalism. No creative writing. Certainly no speech communications. No art history. No archaeological field trips. No business management. No foreign languages outside of ones specialty area.</p>
<p>The list could go on. So for what is Oxford University internationally renowned? Poets and essayists. Journalists. Actors. Playwrights. Stage designers. Linguists. Art museum curators. Choral singers and conductors. Music critics. Archaeologists. Business executives. Statesmen.</p>
<p>At least while I was there, Oxford University was the last and greatest bastion of amateurs and dilettantes on the planet. Everyone at Oxford understood that amateurism in the best sense of the term -- was what the experience was supposed to be all about, and where the bulk of education was to take place. </p>
<p>There were clubs for linguists. There were clubs for debaters (the largest and oldest in the world is, I believe, the Oxford Union, with its own endowment, and which has produced a major share of Englands Prime Ministers, and at which current Prime Ministers are in the habit of making major addresses). There were poetry societies with their own magazines, and competing newspapers. There were societies for the study of Roman antiquities, and for the propagation of raw-food diets. There were chamber music and singing circles of virtually every possible description, and groups for the playing of Scottish bagpipes and Armenian duduks (you can look that one up.) Each college had its own theatrical society (and some for film-making as well), creches for English actors such as Sir Richard Burton (son of a Welsh coal miner); the more adventuresome might be found on the stage of the Oxford Repertory Theatre. There were clubs promoting business start-ups, exploring new frontiers in genetic engineering, or for collecting Greek coins. Almost none of these was supported by the University itself.</p>
<p>Perhaps the quintessential Oxford graduate was the other Sir Richard (Francis) Burton (1821-1896) explorer, linguist, scholar, soldier, anthropologist, prolific and gifted writer, who discovered (for Europeans) the source of the Nile, and translated both The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra. Of course, one shouldnt ignore Cecil Rhodes, W.H. Auden, or T.E. Lawrence. There were T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J. R. Tolkien, and Margaret Thatcher, who read Chemistry, and succeeded Sir Edward Heath as Prime Minister. Upon being unceremonious dispatched as Prime Minister in 1974 (though still serving in Parliament for the next 26 years), Heath, son of a carpenter who had come up to Oxford as an organ scholar, spent much of the next two decades of his life conducting virtually every major symphony orchestra in the world, and organizing and directing European youth symphonies.</p>
<p>So what is the basis for this Oxford secret (other than the fact that through the centuries, the vast majority of matriculates at Oxford were homeschooled)? Well, it starts with an acknowledgment that for the vast majority of people, the most important part of their education may not come from formal study at all, but from the pursuit of passions, the development of talents, the cultivation of hobbies, and the nurturing of relationships with peers possessing similar interests. And it requires a further acknowledgment that this cultivation requires time, and will not stand to be hemmed in by curricula, whatever their quality.</p>
<p>It continues with an understanding that most people do not end up in careers directly related to the subjects they study formally, and that, furthermore, they often make careers out of what had been mere avocations. And for those who do end up in jobs related to their studies, the quality of their life is often highly colored, perhaps even determined by idiosyncratic interests (Sternes hobbyhorses) developed early in life, but allowed to grow to a full flowering (such as Winston Churchills well-known penchant for oil painting.) The Oxford secret gives the lie to the idea that the well-rounded individual is a result of the formal study of many disparate subjects, or even that a well-rounded individual is necessarily a happy one. Above all else, the Oxford secret is embodied in the witticism of one of its favorite sons, the 18th Century historian and Oxford dropout Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) that, The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.</p>
<p>So there it is, complete with directions for homeschoolers: consciously create and cultivate the free disposition to learn, and education will virtually take care of itself. Plant, add water and fertilizer, expose to direct sunlight (of which there seemed precious little during my days in England), and watch them grow!</p>
<p>Oh, and P.S. While I was Oxford I even planned my own excursion to the northwestern frontier of Afghanistan English reader that I was -- but never managed to put together the funds necessary to accomplish it. Ten years later, I did manage to get myself to south India, learned to play a south Indian musical instrument (called the veena), and was invited to play for the south Indian Pope of Vedanta and 5,000 people gathered for a religious ritual. I think I planned all these excursions in search of myself. Im still seeking
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