In his work “The Loss of the Creature”, Walker Percy asserts that learning is a direct confrontation of the unknown, a process of struggle for finding individuality. He contends that unique experience of the learner should be stumbled upon, rather than learning via the formal environments of laboratories and classrooms. Percy supports his claims by comparing the adventures of explorers to the excursions of the sightseers at the Grand Canyon, insisting that unprecedented discovery of the unknown generates better education outcomes than acquiring knowledge with existing expectations, as the “preformed symbolic complex” (47) inhibits learners from learning with an open mind. Advocating learning through authentic experiences, such as physical encounter …show more content…
He praises Garcia Lopez de Cardenas’s personal endeavor to discover the Grand Canyon, whereas he criticized the American couple’s insecurity without their ethnologist friend; he supports the Falkland Islander’s exploration of the dogfish, while he devalues Scarsdale high-school pupils Biology class. The contrasting treatments on the characters shows his deep belief that one’s learning is a private process to which any human interaction has nothing to contribute. When presenting the example of the family visiting the Grand Canyon, who are affected by the typhus outbreak, Percy suggests that the visitors “see the thing better when the others are absent” (49) because they have more “distribution of sovereignty, or zoning.” (49) Percy is indicating that a learner, in order to achieve the best possible learning outcome, one has to acquire more “sovereignty” (49). Though not directly stated, “sovereignty” in this context can be understood as learning resources. That is to say that Percy’s proposed learning method involves not only a personal struggle to encounter the unknown, but also a fight for the “access by privilege” (49). Additionally, he leads his readers to believe that the young men who develop curiosity unintentionally on Literature and Biology on their way to schools, and the girl who eavesdrops classical music will be more likely to become a poet, a scientist and a musician in the future than those who advance with the conventional approach. These examples reinforce Percy’s reasoning that education is a personal matter. However, he advances his claim: learners should keep their learnings to themselves, and attending educational institutions prevents the supposed private process. In the formal educational settings, students are “disinherited” (62) by