Although my current career path is framed by academia, there is a sparky in me that has always used a different blueprint, leaning toward the kinds of learning that did not come with a syllabus. Before I ever set foot in an undergraduate classroom, I knew my path ran through the trades. I worked as an electrician’s apprentice all through my early years, and it is what carried me through school in the most literal sense. More than that, it laid the groundwork for everything that came after. It taught me how to think with my hands, how to read a problem from the inside out, how to trust a kind of intelligence that does not always announce itself in words or professorship.
That experience showed me my own capacity in a way no classroom ever could. It taught me a form of critical thinking that lives in the body, in risk, in doing, in creative engineering. It may have empowered me a little too much – I have been known to rebuild kilns and International Scouts with a certain informed audacity when it comes to combustion and electrical systems, but those are stories for another issue.
What I am getting at is this: I believe deeply in forms of learning that exist outside institutions, alongside them, and sometimes in spite of them. Education is not a single road. It is a network of paths, some paved, some worn in by use, some barely visible until you are already walking them.
This month, we turn toward those paths. We feature voices that ask what it means to learn beyond the university, beyond expectation, and beyond permission.
Randi O'Brien, editor and executive director