Reading & A Passion For Learning

Even if you have exceptional self discipline, manage your time skilfully, exhibit the body language of a dedicated student and regularly consult a wise mentor, it will mean little if you don’t read.  Reading feeds a passion to learn just as wax feeds a candle’s flame.  To put it simply, reading illuminates and informs a life. 

A brief look at four talented leaders and thinkers – Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill -- shows that their learning unfolded in strikingly different ways, sometimes with, but often without, or despite, a teacher.  One theme is constant though: they all have a huge appetite for reading.

Books were especially precious for a lonely Indiana farm boy whose skill with an axe was exceeded only by his hunger to learn new words and to read. Surrounded by dense forests, most of the lad’s time was taken up with felling trees, splitting rails and helping to raise houses.  Taken together, all of Abraham Lincoln’s formal school education added up to only a year, but that didn’t stop him.

One of Lincoln’s cousins, who lived with him as a teenager, recalls: “ When Abe and I returned to the house from work, he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of cornbread, take down a book, sit down in a chair, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read…. Lincoln devoured all the books he could get or lay hands on.”  Lincoln took to hiring himself out to work; his preferred payment was books.

The man who would later pen the eloquent final lines of the Gettysburg Address -- “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” -- read voraciously from the plays of Shakespeare and pored over biographies of Ben Franklin and George Washington.  A friend called the adventures that thrilled Lincoln in the Arabian Nights “a pack of lies.”  “Mighty fine lies” was Lincoln’s response. “My best friend,” he claimed, “is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”

Reading defined the distinctively non-conformist approach of Albert Einstein, father of modern physics. At the age of twelve, Einstein took a radical leap away from faith through his enthusiastic reading of popular scientific books: “I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.”  Einstein would always hold a profound regard for the elegant beauty and balance of what he called the mind of God.  He was less impressed by the received wisdom and the dogmas that dominated the minds of men.  

Einstein’s contempt for authority did not endear him to some of his teachers.  One proclaimed that his insolence made him unwelcome in class. When Einstein insisted that he had committed no offence, the teacher replied, “Yes, that is true, but you sit there in the back row and smile, and your mere presence here spoils the respect of the class for me.”

Einstein later wrote: “A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”  During the six decades of his scientific career, it was Einstein’s powerful independence of mind, prompted by his reading, that gave him the courage to challenge established scientific beliefs and to revolutionise our understanding of physics.

During his 27 years in prison, another revolutionary, Nelson Mandela, struggled to overcome his warders’ determination to cut off any news of the outside world.   As he says in Long Walk To Freedom, “Newspapers are more valuable to political prisoners than gold or diamonds, more hungered for than food or tobacco.” 

One secret benefit of the long hours spent chipping limestone in Robben Island’s notorious quarry was that the warders ate sandwiches which were wrapped in forbidden newspapers.   While prisoners distracted them, the warders’ discarded papers would be plucked from bins and stashed in shirts for later reading.

Little wonder then that in his 91st year, Mandela enthusiastically champions the joy of reading. As he said recently :”This joy is one that I have treasured all my life, and it is one I wish for all South Africans.” 

Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, who became the inspiring voice of resistance to Hitler’s aggression, was a voracious reader.   Churchill may have loved books, but he certainly did not love school.  His housemaster at the famous British “public” school, Harrow, wrote of the young Churchill: “Constantly late for school, … he is so regular in his irregularity that I really don’t know what to do.”

At one point, Churchill received the lowest marks in the school.  Nevertheless it was at Harrow that Churchill, inspired by a superb young teacher, devoured Thackeray, Dickens, Wordsworth and every biography he could lay his hands on.

During his time with the British Army in India, Churchill resolved to read even more widely.  “I read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium.” He found he had “a liking for words and for the feel for words fitting and falling into their places like pennies in the slot.  I caught myself using a good many words the meaning of which I could not define precisely.  I admired these words, but was afraid to use them for fear of being absurd.”  Churchill’s delight in words led to a career as a well-paid journalist and author in addition to his numerous political duties.

If you want to become a world-class student, I can think of no finer advice than Churchill’s on the subject of books:

“If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests your eye … Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org