This month’s Outside Magazine has an article about a guy named Dallas Trombley whose goal is to float a raft down the Hudson River from Albany to Manhattan. Although it seems to be presented as an example perseverance and will, instead it is a terrible indictment of our educational system.
I’ve been teaching since 1993, and for at least the past two decades one of the goals of not just higher education but also K-12 has been the idea of the “lifelong learning.” The educational system seems to have failed utterly at creating a lifelong learner of Mr. Twombley.
Mr. Twombley conceived of the idea of floating down the Hudson during his senior year at SUNY Albany in 2005. In the ensuing 5 years, he has spent nearly $20,000 and sunk six boats in the process of failing to attain his goal and also apparently failing to learn much about boatbuilding or navigation. His first attempt involved a raft made from trash with provisions that included a 30-pack of cheap beer. Within 15 miles they had nearly been run over by commercial traffic twice and had to be rescued by the marine police. The article goes on to list a litany of failures (didn’t bother to check the weather to see which way the prevailing winds blew; crashed into navigation buoys; charts and cellphone washed overboard; no sunscreen; and of course the factor that ended more than one trip: running out of beer.) As his seventh trip approaches, Twombley says, “I don’t see anything that could possibly go wrong.”
His goal is an admirable one, but Twombley’s education has completely failed in teaching him how to learn. Humans have been navigation waterways for millenia, and they have been traveling the Hudson River for centuries. A bit of research could have saved him thousands of dollars and avoided endangering not just the lives of himself and those whom he has convinced to join him as crew, but also those of the people who work on the river and who have been called on repeatedly to rescue him. Instead, however, he has proceeded solely on the basis of trial and (repeated) error. As Bismarck said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
