Fred Jones

Last month we had a 'history player' from the MNHS come to our spring class and present the life and times of Fred Jones (an African American who spent 18 years in Hallock, MN and then later took a job in Minneapolis that would lead to the Thermo King industry).

After this performance I ordered the only book on Mr. Jones - A Man with a Million Ideas. I finished it last night.

I could blog for days on Mr. Jones, but this morning I'll limit it to one example of how - despite only having four years of schooling - Mr. Jones never stopped learning. The authors talked about how he would educate himself through mail order class. In all the instances he'd read the books and digest the new ideas, but Jones never bothered to complete any of the lessons and certainly never sent in any for grades. The joy for Jones was in learning something new and then applying to directly to a situation in his life (learning about sound waves so he could develop a record player to help his friend who owned a movie theater in town so they could have sound to their movies or learning about radio waves so he and another friend could start up their own pirate radio station or learning about the eye so he could develop a lens - again for his movie theater friend - that allowed Jones to create his own machine that would activate the sound in the new movie strips).

Is that not the truest sense of an education?