American Education as an Addictive Process

Undergraduates come to me very often and say, "I want to go on to graduate school in psychology. Where should I go?" And I always ask them the question, "Why do you want to study psychology?" And as I listen to them, usually one of two answers develops. Answer number one is: "I want to become a psychologist. I want to play the psychology game. I want to be able to play the role and use the terms you use, and I want to be an assistant professor and then an associate professor and then a full professor, and I want get tenure, and maybe if I'm really ambitious, I might get to be president of the American Psychological Association." Well, that's fair enough, and for someone who has that ambition I can give them advice about the strategic universities to go to, like go to Michigan or Yale but don't go to XYZ.

Some students, though, will say, "I want to study psychology because I want to study human nature" or "I want to find out what's what." To do some good. And then I can tell them, well, forget about graduate school. What kind of good do you want to do? Do you want to help the mentally ill? Then get yourself committed to a mental hospital. Stay there for a year or two; you'll learn more about mental illness in that two years than our profession has learned in a hundred years. If you want to learn about delinquency and reducing crime, go down to the tough section, learn the crime game, learn how to make a man-to-man contact with tough guys, learn from them why they are crooks and criminals. Spend a year in prison, no as a psychologist, but maybe as a guard, or cleaning up garbage, and you'll learn more than you will ever learn in a criminology textbook. That is how it goes. There is no problem that can't be best solved and best worked out at this stage of ignorance by getting right into the reality.

Of course, another objection to this suggestion is: "After all, we do need some information and we do need facts and we have to learn them in university courses." And I say, "Sure there are existential problems; there are certain times when in trying to solve an existential problem you will want to borrow the experience and the data of previous investigators." You can use the library, but again, beware, it's just like a narcotic. Library books are very dangerous addictive substances. Like heroin, books can become an end in themselves. I made the suggestion years ago at Harvard University that they lock up Widener Library, put chains on the doors, and have little holes in the wall like in bank tellers' windows, and if a student wanted to get a book, he would have to come with a little slip made out showing that he had some existential, practical question. He wouldn't say that he wanted to stuff a lot of facts in his mind so that he could impress a teacher or be one up on the other students in the intellectual game. No. But if he had an existential problem, then the library would help him get all the information that could be brought to bear on that problem.

Needless to say, this plan didn't make much of a hit, and the doors of the Harvard Library are still open. You can still get dangerous narcotic volumes without a prescription at Harvard.

— Excerpt from American Education as an Addictive Process and Its Cure by Timothy Leary