An education
Kerouac style
“The Education of Jack Kerouac” is the title of an essay that’s taking shape— and taking up a lot of space—in my brain and in a notebook. The topic fascinates me—his learning experiences from home to Catholic elementary schools with religious sisters and Jesuit brothers, to public junior and senior high, to Columbia University, and beyond.
A key piece in his education as a teenager (1936-1938) was his outstanding—and profitable—method and manner of playing hookey; no kidding.
In his own words:1
“Bragging still, but telling the truth still, during all this time I was getting As and Bs in high school, mainly because I used to cut classes once a week, to play hookey that is, just so I could go to the Lowell Public Library and study by myself at leisure such things as old chess books with their fragrance of scholarly thought, their old bindings, leading me to investigate other fragrant old books like Goethe, Hugo, of all things Maxims of William Penn, just reading to show off to myself that I was reading. Yet this led the way to actual reading. Led to a careful reading of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, stupid examinations of the Harvard Classics, and deep awe in the tiny print on onion skinned pages white as snow as found in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica with its detailed record of all that ever happened until 1910 as compiled for the last time in copious happy terms by Oxford and Cambridge scholars—loving books and the smell of the old library and always reading in the rotunda part of the back where was a bust of Caeser in the bright morning sun and the entire range of encyclopedias in semicircle shelves.”
And the rest of the day?
“What even actually furthered my education there was that, at about 11 A.M. I’d saunter out of the library, cut through the Dalton Street tracks near the YMCA so as not to be seen out the window maybe by Joe Maple my English teacher, cut across the railroad bridge near the Giant Store, over tracks that ran over naked crossties through which you could see that whirling deep canal with its plop of floating snows, then down Middlesex to the Rialto Theater, where I’d sit and study the old 1930s movies in careful detail. Well of course most of us have done this anyway but not when playing hookey at eight fifteen and after reading at leisure in library until eleven, hey?”
Hey, indeed; what a great day playing hookey.
Vanity of Duluoz, 27-28.
My eyes are bad. I couldn't understand the connection between skipping class to play "hockey" but reading in the library. It all became clear and sensical upon a third reading when my eyes and my brain came into a joint focus and hockey was replaced by hookey. While I never played hookey (excepting Pirate home opener day more a ritual, rite of passsge) or hockey, I can relate to learning more from reading rather than sitting before a droning teacher. You can love learning and dislike schooling. Although learning is always more productive when it's guided. I'm wondering, did old Jack have any guides when it came to personal enlightenment as he was growing up?
Thanks. How'd all that positive influence result in the antics and person of On the Road?