To Know Is Not Enough

“What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

John Rice

“There were no letter grades at Black Mountain College, nor were there required courses, set curricula, standard examinations, or prescribed teaching methods.”


“When John Rice established Black Mountain College in 1933, he sought to create a school that dissolved distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, that conceived of education and life as deeply intertwined, and that placed the arts at the center rather than at the margins of learning.“

“For Rice, education was registered not by grades or other standard criteria but in a heightened desire to learn and to question, which would lead students to an expanded aptitude for solving a range of problems and to a richer sense of self.”


Leap Before You Look

A Progressive Education by Ruth Erikson

p. 77

John Rice

“…there is something of the artist in everyone and the development of this talent, however small, carrying with it a severe discipline of its own, results in the students becoming more sensitive to order in the world and within himself than he can ever be through intellectual effort alone.”

John Rice, Black Mountain College Bulliten, 1935

via Look Before You Leap (p. 34)

Spicy for my brain.

Love when Hank describes pursing the work that is “spicy for my brain.”

I am also not motivated by earning money so this is actually really similar to the aha moment I felt when I started Neurokind.

Also very excited the Good Store has a single identity now. It will be so much easier to share and tell people about it. (For anyone browsing 100% of the profits go to charity. Just like Newman’s Own.)

Life

“Life is not about reading out a blueprint, it’s about creating flexible rules and resources from which diverse forms might emerge.”

Philip Ball, How Life Really Works

https://nautil.us/how-life-really-works-435813/

via Austin Kleon

https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/spend-it-all-every-time

Retire

“…for me retirement didn't mean that I stopped writing. It just meant that maybe I stopped writing when people expect me to write.”

“…retirement has meant that I don't obsess over becoming more rich or famous or more viewed or whatever. Instead, I try to focus my definition of work on passion and impact…”

I’m fascinated at the parallels here with my own recent reframe. I never experienced the amount of success that John Green has, but that pressure to always keep growing is so built into society it takes continuous effort to make another choice.