The Thread #4 Thinking Like A Mule

Education is more than schools and books, it is the totality of the experiences of any person. Growing up on a small farm, those experiences have their own character, their own domain within the bigger world of experiences. If you miss them, then supplanting them is hardly possible, and most people would be thankful for that hole in their education.

My dad, his oldest brother, his sister and her husband, and my grandfather went together to buy just under 200 acres of land on what is now Forest Lawn Drive in Weddington. That was about the time that I was born. The Byrum boys from over near Union Church came over and cut the timber from the land. The income from the timber paid for the land.

If you know anything about small farms, then this information is pertinent. While there was limited cleared fields on the higher ground, along the nearly one mile stretch of the West Fork Twelve Mile Creek that ran through the property, there were five good size bottoms. A bottom is a field along a creek or river. In residential terms, it is the flood plain.

It was in one of those bottoms that we set aside space for the grazing of the farm animals that we had. We fenced in about twenty acres total to get one bottom and the creek included for a source of water. Thus, when we had to milk a cow or hook the mule up to a wagon or plow, the first order of business was to find them in the fifteen acres of woods and five acres of field.

Now, cows are pattern animals. They always go to the same area, they take the same paths, and they tend to come to the barn when they are hungry. But, a mule is a different animal. He knows nothing of patterns and he is as likely to be standing beside a tree deep withing the wooded area as he is to be in the field grazing.

My dad had the little saying about finding the mule. He would tell us to think of ourselves as a mule and then decide where we would be today if that were the case. He assured us that if we really did that, we would go directly to where the mule would be standing.

It may well be that people today have not the slightest idea of how to think like a mule, or to use the transfer of learning that is inherit in that ability, think like another person. It seems that we have no desire to find the other person any longer and believe that it is incumbent on the other person to always think like us. It is always he or she who is lost, not us.

Now, I am danged sure that the old mule never considered that it was he who was lost. When we appeared with the bridle, he, no doubt, figured that he had found us. If a mule can think, that has to be how he would think because I know that in the human world we rightfully call people of that kind of mind, "mule headed."

The Olivia Dukakas character in "Steel Magnolias" said that it was the ability of humans to accessorize that put us above the other animals. I would like to add a second human characteristic that does that also, the ability to compromise. In more specific terms, it is the human ability to think like the other person and see the value in that person's way.

The acidity of the conversation today on both sides, or all sides, of the issues is of the lower forms of life that we want to think of ourselves as being above. It is of people who have been given so much that they have lost contact with the reality of their own dependence on the others around them.

The mule went to the tree to scratch himself, forgot why he went, and just stood there. We humans, likewise go to positions and forget how we got there, but we are danged sure that those who stand elsewhere are somehow out of place or lost. We never consider that we should think like that person for a moment and maybe find ourselves in the process.

Here is where I am going with all this. We have devalued the humanities in our schools. We now call people educated who are nothing more than trained to do a job. That is a catastrophe for our society. My favorite people to pick on are the half of our college students who are enrolled in business schools.

But, it goes far beyond that. Most colleges are nothing more than cheap training grounds for corporations. The result is a population, not so much unwilling to try the humanity of compromise as incapable of doing it. Rigidity and absolutes, and the wars that accompany them, are the gospel preached from the religious dais and the secular dais alike.

We must put respectable humanities requirements back into our education. We must find the will to require that in order for a person to carry a degree from a college or university, he or she must have a good background in the liberal arts. The quote of why is Biblical. "What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?"