A couple months ago, me and a friend were discussing our grades for the semester. After revealing my grades they responded, “You’re smart.” I then tried to explain why I did not think grades mattered, and how hopefully, if I am smart, it has little to do with grades.

To most people, such a belief is perplexing. Grades are meant to be a mark of intellectual achievement, a sign of intelligence. This is true to an extent. The problem I have, however, is that such an estimation reduces the value of a fact from a personal and adaptable piece of information to a lifeless bit of material that is only seen as important in so much as it externally designates intellectual success.

Grades divorce the fact from an applicability that is relevant to how a person confronts and navigates the conflicts and questions of life. The result is that learning, and the search and attainment of knowledge, is made into a lifeless enterprise. That is, once a person attains the grade, there is no motivation to retain the fact or to see it as having a lasting and flexible quality that can be applied to life. Learning becomes lifeless. Wisdom is divorced from knowledge.

There are scores of people who have achieved academic success, but who cannot engage intimately with what they learned. Conversations with such people are very bland. But of course, such people usually point to their grades to console themselves. Worse is that these same people often fail to have opinions of their own, and are intellectually handicapped in the face of subjective discussions. What happened is that such people took the grade and substituted it in for the fact that it represents. The concern is then for the grade and what society says of people who have good marks. There is no longer a concern or motivation to retain the fact once the grade can stand in for it.

The attraction to holding onto the grade at the expense of the fact itself limits the utility of knowledge and keeps learning from being seen as an evolving and dynamic process. Not only that, the search for knowledge and wisdom is kept from being a way by which an individual connects with the wider world in a deep and meaningful way. The reduction of knowledge to a grade is thus another example of the common human desire to objectify concepts and dynamic processes into actual things. Like all things objectified by the individual, they are meant to correspond to the individuals perception of itself as a fixed thing.

Of course, it is not just the idea of a grade that is at fault. The idea of a fact is also one that is quite stultifying, for without an attitude that understands knowledge to be more than a simple piece of information from long ago, facts appear lifeless and irrelevant to present circumstances. Why should one know the battle of Actium was fought in 31 BCE or that Alexander the Great was Macedonian?

Thus I want to express what learning means to me, and what motivates me to study. My hope is that this will give some sort of an idea into why, once a semester of school ends, I’m still reading and writing papers, and why on some Friday nights I prefer to stay home with a new book and reflect on my thoughts. Lastly, I should point out that this search goes beyond what is commonly referred to as the distinction between “book smarts” and “street smarts.” There is a degree of truth to “street smarts” embracing actual “hands on” experience in a way that academically minded individuals do not, but the same shortsightedness that prevents certain people from moving beyond the grade, prevents those preoccupied with “street smarts” from seeing the dynamic utility of factual application and appropriation.

Learning for me is like interacting with a living breathing entity. There is nothing dead about history or information in general. To see things otherwise is a failure of the imagination and an inability to take seriously what it means to actually live; to be born from a process of causes and effects, and to participate in those causes and effects without limits. One thinks history is dead because one interprets an event as static while also reducing the great figures of history to individuals of an equally static and far away time. Yet both events and the people who participated in them are linked by themes that constantly resound through the ages no matter the time and place. Caesar is gone, along with his Roman Empire, but empires still exist. The men whose desire for power creates them still exist. War still exists. Tough decisions; both communal and existential still exist. The concept of a belief, which governs the making of those decisions, still exists. Internal conflict regarding how to act, who to love, and when to fight, still exist.

It is because such things exist that history is very much alive. Thus one can read Thucydides and perceive a cultural and temporal gap between our time and the Peloponnesian War, but if one engages the text with the right mindset, one realizes that there is no, or very little gap between Pericles decision to go to war with Sparta and decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. That is, we read of a person who had to make a decision; a decision based on beliefs. We then realize that this is something we all do everyday. Thus when we read history we get an understanding for realities of the time and see them recurring in our own. We engage with history to sympathize with other individuals who have had to experience the conflicts of life, and we learn from them. They let us know that as individuals our struggles are not as unique as we imagine. They recur as facets of what it means to be human.

Most people have never been or will never be in a position where they must make a decision that affects a whole country, but everyone knows what it is like to make tough decisions, and to be in conflict with what one may want against what a particular situation affords.

In a similar way as to how history is not dead, literature is not fictitious. The stories themselves are largely made up, but the actual dilemmas and experiences of the characters are ones that individuals understand every day. Moreover, the authors that compose literary works draw from the same emotions, and experiences that face people everyday. That is why literature has such an incredible power to move us. There is no reason history can’t be experienced in the same way.

Thus there is more to be discovered, experienced, and appreciated if one can break through the habit of seeing things simply. Nothing is simple. By this I mean no thing is isolated from the rest of the world. The father of a friend once quipped to me when I was young that, “simple minds are impressed by simple things.” This was in reference to a rock I was looking at. The truth, however, is that only a simple mind finds things to be simple. That rock was not just a rock. If one looks at it closely with a particular probing eye, one sees the thousands of pieces of sediment composed of it. One appreciates how solid it is and the hundreds of years taken to make it so solid. One might see a fossil remnant in it and begin reflecting on what it means to leave an imprint in the world.

Thus one constantly moves from an engagement with an object to that object’s relevance and reflection in one’s own life. A rock was a product of patience. It is engaged in time. It was constructed like all things, and like all things, it will pass. There is no reason that the line that designates animate and inanimate things has to be strict or exist at all. Nor does the line between such things as plants. One can look at a tree, and be inspired by how firm it stands in the middle of a storm. Surely such an appreciation is relevant to an individual’s life where he or she needs strength to be true to one’s beliefs, even in the midst of a storm of contrary opinions?

What this drives at is the realization that every piece of knowledge represents a gateway into a larger world, a world of interconnectivity. This interconnectivity has the power to bring the past to us, and to make it an active, and living presence in one’s life. It has the power to blur the line between living and non-living things. Looking at things deeply allows one to realize that life is constant exchange and relationship.

Thus studying for me is an engagement with the world that molds the past and future into the present moment where living and non-living things find their relevance in a dynamic and constantly changing process that represents, at its core, the very universe itself. Such an appreciation can never be designated by a grade.