Education: Five Ways to Wisdom

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arbitrary choices, for there is no limit to the possibilities of learning. There are times when these possibilities seem overwhehning, and one hears echoes of Socrates' confession, "All I know is that I know nothing." Yet that too is a challenge. "We shall not cease from exploration," as T.S. Eliot put it, "and the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." The seemingly momentous years of schooling, then, are only the beginning.

Henry Adams, who said m The Education of Henry Adams that Harvard "taught little, and that little ill," was 37 when he took up the study of Saxon legal codes and 42 when he first turned to writing the history of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations, and 49 when he laboriously began on Chinese. In his 50s, a tiny, why figure with a graying beard, the future master of Gothic architecture solemnly learned to ride a bicycle. —By Otto Friedrich. Reported by

Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago