While learning is not wasted on the young, adult learning has a magnificence unattainable by children.

Alas, there’s no suitable descriptive for “adult learners.” The acronym SOTA populated university bureaucratese back in the 1980s when my mother took the plunge and entered college for the first time. She laughed at her official classification as a “Student Older than Average,” quipping that if professors couldn’t see she was decades older, did she really want to be in their classrooms?

Clever administrators saw something else: the potential of adding students like my mother to their rosters. Older students usually paid in full or had benefits like the G.I. Bill. What was there not to like? Nonetheless, I remember receiving carefully worded memos back at SMU that urged us professors to handle our new SOTAs with extra flexibility and understanding. They were, after all, . . . older.

Ha. I’ll tell you what happened. Without few exceptions, my SOTAs led the class. Focused, measured, committed, and with decades of life experience, SOTAs posed the best questions, evidenced the best humor, took the most care with assignments (despite their own busy adult lives), and uplifted the entire dynamic of the classroom. True, their fingers or voices might not always generate the virtuosity of students in their 20s. But performance is only one aspect of studying music. Researching, teaching, analyzing, editing, conducting, and composing tended to be the desired fields of SOTAs, not to mention the then-new vista of music technology. So whenever those tear-off, dot-matrix, accordion-folded class rolls hit my desk and revealed an asterisk and the letters SOTA next to a name, I knew something good would happen.

Right now I’m waist-deep leading an on-line seminar filled with a grand group of adult learners. In fact, you might call them super-charged learners—members of Memoria College’s new Classical Education program. The course is called Imaginative Literature 67B, although a better name would be “Have You Lost Your Mind? 607B.” The reading list is hefty: Goethe’s Faust, Gogol’s The Nose, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov, and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Despite the heft, though, and the presence of many dark moments in these works (particularly Brothers Karamazov), the sessions thus far have been effervescent with discovery and delight. Adult readers immediately enter into the sophisticated, unexpectedly rollicking humor of Mephisto’s relationship with Faust. They delight in the absurd, yet all too true, tangle of bureaucratic idiocies and repressive social mores that shape stories like The Nose. The personal dramas constituting Anna Karenina will not seem strange to anyone of a certain age who has witnessed (or maybe even lived through) such human entanglements.

And if anything is true, it is this: adult learners stay engaged in a quest for Truth. Consequently, Dostoevsky’s tortuous personal and literary path towards Truth will be familiar territory. Finally, only an adult can fully revel in the transcendent qualities of Chekhov’s plays. The humility and pomposity of Chekhov’s characters, the mundane, almost invisible dynamics of the plot lines, the restrained passion and the breadth of their timing—these ever-old, ever-modern qualities speak directly to an adult mind.

When The Cherry Orchard takes us to our final station, we will stand on the platform as somewhat different people than when we started the journey. This is what adult learners know that children cannot. Adults pursue learning because we want to stay on the journey. It’s fine to arrive at a destination, but once there, adults tend to step up to the counter and purchase a token for yet another voyage. Adults enjoy wrestling with the material, even when it intimidates, dismays, or discourages. We gain from it, even when it seems to defeat us. Adults also know that stepping away from something and returning to it refreshed usually brings new, otherwise unattainable insights.

My hope right now, particularly as the buds of normalcy start to poke their heads out of the soil, is that we can continue to do everything possible to aid you in your own adult pursuit of learning. If there are ways to support your work, or help you feel more confident (adult learners do struggle with confidence), I want to try. Believe me, I know the challenges, particularly the struggle with confidence. In fact, only with age can we understand sayings like “the more I learn, the less I know.” These sayings exist because they are true.

Community helps too. That is why I’m exceptionally happy to see that conferences and symposia seem poised to relaunch this year. Yes, yes, yes, the technological possibilities of virtual learning brought forth extraordinary blessings in 2020. We would be fools to abandon their possibilities and efficacy!

But how I long for the kind of camaraderie we experience standing in line for a latte, passing such moments with friends and strangers by sharing book titles we’ve just discovered, or floating the latest frustration that tries to derail our best efforts. These are moments when we touch one another on the shoulder and empathize with a combination of tenderness, humor, patience, and prayer. These are the moments when our mortal existence is touched by the gentle light of divinity. We will never take them for granted again.