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A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track. I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that. Not be too troubled. Sinéad O'Connor ‘Rememberings’

I decided to read Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir Rememberings after being reminded of her music via a playlist shared with me. I remember reading reporting about the book and extracts when it was released, and was interested in reading it, but had lingered on my list of books to read.

The book feels like it is made up of two halves. The first part covers O’Connor’s childhood and early career, up until the fallout following her appearance on “Saturday Night Live” where she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II. This includes part of the book explores her fractured and abusive relationship with her mother, being sent to Grianán Training Centre in response to her shoplifting, her early music career, recording her debut album while pregnant, and the rapid rise associated with the success of Nothing Compares 2 U.

The second part covers the rest of O’Connor’s career. This includes a reflection on her various albums, her challenges with mental health, her experiences with drugs, her exploration of different religions, discussion of encounters with famous people, such as Mohammad Ali, and having four children with four fathers. The second part is a bit patchy, as she had a breakdown and struggled to remember anything much afterwards.

The reason I haven’t written much about what happened between 1992 and 2015 is that in August 2015, after I’d written the first part of this book, I had an open-surgery radical hysterectomy in Ireland followed by a total breakdown.
I had gotten as far as the Saturday Night Live story, but I did not write anything else for the four years it took me to recover from the breakdown, and by the time I’d recovered, I was unable to remember anything much that took place before it.

Source: Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor

Whether it be choosing to shave her head after being told to be more feminine, being encouraged to terminate her first child by record executives, tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II or escaping a pillow fight with Prince, it feels that the book was largely a cathartic effort to reclaim the narrative of O’Connor’s life. This was all brought to a head with her postscript written to her father in which she links her mental illness to being hit in the head by a train door at the age of a 11.

All in all, Rememberings is equal part sad and funny, maybe because through it all she was able to survive. Its fractured and rambling nature reminded me a little of Tony Cohen’s somewhat incomplete memoir. Listening to O’Connor’s reading (via Borrowbox) also helped make the book real, especially when she would often laugh at the humour and absurdity associated with various situations. Although not necessarily seeking sympathy, Remembering provides a peek behind the curtain.

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Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. Robert Pirsig ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

At its heart, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a simple tale that praises basic values and decries ugly technology. Pirsig tells his story while riding the secondary roads across the Dakotas to the mountains, touching Yellowstone National Park before a pause in Bozeman, Montana. From there, he crosses into Idaho and over to Oregon before dipping down into California and reaching the Pacific coast and San Francisco. Pretty good trip, really.

Source: Zen and Art by Mark Richardson

I always find it strange how the same book can take on different lives based on the actual experience of reading. I was given Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Stacey and Dan for my birthday. Dan’s dad taught high school philosophy and Dan said it was a good introductory text. I must admit, I’m not sure I took it all in at the time (I feel I took more in this time.) Although I remember the discussion of gumption, “the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going,” and the different appreciation of the motorcycle. I feel that a lot of the philosophical side may have gone over my head as I did not necessarily have the patience or prior knowledge to connect it to.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a novel intertwined with different threads. It is part memoir, tracing Pirsig’s own life and experiences, part travelogue recounting a journey across America from east to west, part philosophical treatise, exploring the question of quality, and part reflection on life with mental illness. On the Overdue podcast, Andrew Cunningham and Craig Getting suggest that it is similar in style to Moby Dick where the story is interspersed with other narratives about the philosophy of quality. While Pirsig once explained the various characters a ‘Greek chorus’:

Pirsig: I explained to them that the story isn’t really about them, that they are like a Greek chorus there to “Oh” and “Ah” and give a semblance of reality to a tale that seems always to ride at the very edge of incredibility and needs all the help it can get.

Source: Zen and Now by Mark Richardson

However, the relationship with Chris does balance things and provides more than a chorus.

Personally, there was something compelling in re-reading the novel having lived more of a life. I feel like I have gone through my own Phadreas-like experience. (Although it may also be something of a mis-reading of quality.) Not a psychotic breakdown, but a grapple with ideals. I tried to get students to self-grade themselves. (See for example reflections on Genius Hour, Robotics and Digital Publishing.) I tried to help them manage their own inquiries and ‘turn into free men.’

The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

It too felt like a battle between doing something because it has always been done that way as opposed to developing a deeper appreciation of the practice itself. My students were confused as this somewhat contradicted what was happening within their other classes, it did not necessarily make sense. (I say this, but interestingly in cleaning up some old school things that I kept for far too long I actually found a card from a student thanking me for the opportunity to develop an excursion, which I guess was a win.) I do not believe my intent was not directly inspired by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but if we are to believe Pierre Bayard, that we are the sum of our accumulated books, then it must have inspired me in some way on the journey.

One of the things that I was surprised by was how useful the book was for my work with technology as it was personally. In particular, I was left thinking about Pirsig’s list of gumption traps. Whether it be external setbacks:

  • Inadequate tools or materials: When the tools or materials you have are not suitable for the task.
  • Environmental factors: Such as poor lighting or uncomfortable working conditions.
    Or internal hang-ups:
  • Value Traps: These block affective understanding. For example, when you undervalue the importance of a task.
  • Truth Traps: These block cognitive understanding. For instance, when you have incorrect assumptions or misunderstandings about the task.
  • Muscle Traps: These block psychomotor behavior. An example is physical fatigue or lack of coordination

It was also interesting to consider the various lessons as I have been watching the house being built across the road by the owner builder. Each day he returns, either overseeing the various trades or working away on things. It often seems like he is not doing much, but as Pirsig suggests, he is probably looking at the underlying form.

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

All in all, there was something about Pirsig that reminded me of something I read once in a review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:

When did he first find evidence of the alien landscape that’s inside his narrator Christopher’s head? “Oh, I think that if you’re a writer you have that in your own head from quite an early age. I think it’s true there are two types of kids as school. One type probably breezes through school like gazelles across the veldt. For the more troubled types on the edge of the playground, how you get from one day to the next is a mystery. All writers come from the latter, because only if you’re in that group does the working of the human mind become an object of interest.”

Source: Mark Haddon: This year’s big read by John Walsh (Independent)

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Is autodidacticism about how you get to know something? Or is it about what you know? It is who you know? Is it how you know? (Or rather how you demonstrate knowing?) Is autodidacticism an aptitude or an attitude? A behavior? A predilection? A performance? Is autodidacticism a signal of learnedness? Audrey Watters ‘How Do Schools Affect Autodidacticism?’

I was reading Laura Hilliger’s recent missive in which she shared her experience of overhearing the hairdressers at the hair salon talking about going to a conference. For Laura, this experience was a reminder of all the things she has no idea about and how lifelong learning is about more than just picking up new skills:

Lifelong learning isn’t just about skill development, you know? It’s also about becoming aware to the world around you and pondering the implications of what you haven’t thought about before. There are so many thoughts you haven’t thought.

Source: FBT on Complacency and Conferences

This got me thinking about what it is I talk about when I talk about lifelong learning. Here then are some thoughts on the matter.

Reflecting on a life lived, Wouter Groeneveld recently wondered about the idea of developing a personal philosophy to live by?

Now you know why my hopes of reaching eighty diminish by the day. But it’s not too late to create my own philosophy. I’ve never felt a more urgent need to do something than this. I have been taking notes on how to live and how great philosophers before our time approach life in general, but in 2025, it is time to grab those notes and rework them into something of my own. Then I too can rest assured that the remainder of my life, all I have to do is to live up to my own set of rules.

Source: You Should Compile Your Own Philosophy by Wouter Groeneveld

I wonder about this, is such a pursuit an example of lifelong learning or life learning? I wonder if a personal philosophy is itself a lifelong pursuit, something continually devised. Ideas “held tightly, let go lightly?”

In Pierre Bayard’s exploration of reading and identity, he argues that we are the sum of the accumulated books we have read.

For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering.

Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

However, I don’t believe this is some Matrix-style “I know kung fu”, where we know everything about books, or anything for that matters. We do not take in books as an objective entity, some things stand out, other parts are missed, others are forgotten over time.

Gert Biesta talks about the shift when it comes to lifelong learning to be about being ‘productive and employable’:

In about three decades, then, the discourse of lifelong learning seems to have shifted from ‘learning to be’ to ‘learning to be productive and employable’. Or, as Peter Jarvis has put it:

“The lifelong learning society has become part of the current economic and political discourse of global capitalism, which positions people as human resources to be developed through lifelong learning, or discarded and retrained if their job is redundant. (Jarvis, 2000, quoted in Grace, 2004, p. 398).”

The question this raises is how we should understand these developments and, more importantly, how we should evaluate them.

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

This focus on the economic comes at the expensive of personal fulfillment and democratic understanding.

Aspin and Chapman make a distinction between three of such purposes which, in their words, are: (1) lifelong learning for economic progress and development; (2) lifelong learning for personal development and fulfilment; and (3) lifelong learning for social inclusiveness and democratic understanding and activity (see Aspin and Chapman, 2001, pp. 39­40).

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

Another consequence to the economic is the shift of responsibility to the individual.

Yet the point is not only that learning has become increasingly an individual activity. Under the influence of the learning economy learning has also increasingly become an individual issue and an individual responsibility (see, for example, Grace, 2004; Fejes, 2004). It is not only that under the imperatives of the learning economy only the economic function of lifelong learning seems to count as ‘good’ or desirable learning. There is also a clear tendency to shift the responsibility for learning to the individual ­or, at a larger scale, to shift this responsibility away from the state towards the private sector. In the learning economy learning ceases to be a collective good and increasingly becomes an individual good. In this scenario the state is less and less a provider and promoter of lifelong learning and increasingly becomes the regulator and auditor of the ‘learning market’ (see Biesta, 2004[a]).

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

This is fascinating to think about as the onus in the organisation I work in is for people to find their own professional development. Although there is money allocated, limited support or guidance is provided. What makes this even worse is that when you put in a request for professional development, you need to justify.

Reflecting upon lifelong learning and autodidacticism, Audrey Watters provides a series of questions to dig deeper:

what are the effects of an institution on an -ism?

Is autodidacticism about how you get to know something? Or is it about what you know? It is who you know? Is it how you know? (Or rather how you demonstrate knowing?)

Is autodidacticism an aptitude or an attitude? A behavior? A predilection? A performance?

Is autodidacticism a signal of learnedness?

Source: How Do Schools Affect Autodidacticism? by Audrey Watters

Thinking about this, maybe lifelong learning is actually people? This has me thinking about a post I wrote a few years ago wondering whether people not presentations make conferences and whether the power of a good PLN is the ability to bring in different ideas. I feel this is something I have lost with the changes in social media or maybe it reflects the changes in my work?

In the end, I wonder if the best lifelong learning is actually stopping and considering what it is we consider by lifelong learning? Learning about learning? Collecting and connecting the dots. To return to Laura’s point at the start, here is to more thoughts I haven’t thought.