By Keith Frome
Buffalo, NY – In 1989, a graduate student at Harvard named Leonid Fridman founded the Society of Nerds and Geeks and wrote a long article in the "New York Times" about the organization, arguing that America would eventually become a third-rate power if it did not honor and celrbate its nerds and rise against the "anti-intellectual values that pervade our society." He claimed that even Harvard was rampant with anti-intellectual students and that it prized its athletes and socialites over its intellectuals. Students there he said were ashamed to admit even to their friends how much they studied and that very few students loved to learn for the sake of learning. Mr. Fridman proposed that the terms nerd and geek (a moniker, by the way, which originally referred to a street performer who bit the heads off live chickens) should become labels of pride and prestige and that parents should brag that they had brought up a nerd for a child.
Some people, including myself, shot off letters to the "New York Times." A few of the letters, including my own, were published and the debate continued to rage. A class at Harvard Law School used the letters as examples of public debate, national call-in radio shows were dedicated to the subject, and a book called "Short Takes" published our essays. The people who disagreed with Mr. Fridman did not do so on the grounds that they didn't like nerds or that they felt learning was somehow not cool. First, we believed that he had mischaracterized mother Harvard -- but more importantly we argued that he had misrepresented the vision of a well-education person. We argued that according to Mr. Fridman, you are either an athlete, who neither reads nor writes or who spends time away from the field house punishing intellectuals, or you are a nerd who totally devotes his time to learning at the expense of social skills and physical prowess. Or you are neither and just attend frat parties. Anytime you hear someone using a lot of "ors," you should be suspect. The world is more full of "ands" than "ors."
Mr. Fridman's article struck a national nerve because it involved a core question of any society: How ought we to educate our children? The discussion continues today, in many different contexts. Is it achievement or appreciation that we're after? Knowledge or understanding? Good test takers or well-rounded children? As an educated person and an educator myself, I believe it is all of the above. Mr. Fridman forgot that education is not just academic instruction, but enrochment and edification, too, and that its goal is not to produce stereotypes, but to inpsire fully enaged human beings. Individuals who are thoughtful, healthy and who care about other people; individuals who may be intellectuals, but also painters and poets and volunteers and runners and skiers and skaters and ball players and flutists, too. Doers and thinkers who do not let anyone pin a label on them in order to rob them of their complicated and wonderful collection of talents and abilities.
Emerson placed character above intellect, and Socrates taught that the meaning of life is to know thy true self. I think that at the core, education exists to remind us of this tenet and to enccourage our ever-dawning acknowledgement that each of us is always growing, and alwys on the prcipice of becoming. We are, after all, human beings, not human "standing stills."
Listener-commentator Keith Frome is headmaster of the Elmwood Franklin School in Buffalo.
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