“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child how to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

(Pause.) In many instances, of course, you learned too well, both of you. The natural person that is yourself loved to draw and paint. You did that apart from what you had to do in school as a boy. You were lucky in your relationship with Miss Bowman.¹ Your talent brought you into correspondence with her. You can trust your natural inclinations. These sessions, in that regard, came naturally, as the expression of natural abilities and tendencies, finally emerging despite your official views at the time, jointly.

1. Helen Bowman — Miss Bowman, my parents and I always called her — was my art teacher in the Sayre, Pennsylvania, high school from 1935 until my graduation in 1937. Through an arrangement with my mother, Stella Butts, Miss Bowman loaned me the money to attend commercial art school in New York City from 1939 to 1941. I was drafted into the Air Force in 1942, during World War II, and repaid the loan over my three years of service.