A MASTER STILL LEARNING

It's 1964.   Fred Burkhart is in jail.   Again.   His artist's eye scans the 5 men he is sharing a cell with and settles on a face in the corner - a 6'6" black Panther who has just been sentenced to life.   At first, the man doesn't notice that Burkhart is sketching his portrait, but when he does, he starts walking Burkhart's way.

Education is a funny thing.   Most people think you can get it at school, as if knowledge were a product you could bottle and buy.   But we're talking about education with Fred Burkhart, and we've just met his greatest teacher.

"He just starting strangling me, yelling 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'   And I replied, 'mMpharggh!!!' cuz he was really choking me, and I was finally able to say, 'I was just sketching your picture, man.'   Well, he ripped it up and said, 'So what is that to me, honky?   What is your art to me?'   Best lesson I ever learned - worth two Ph.D.'s."

Burkhart doesn't have a Ph.D. - or a Masters, B.A., or high school diploma.   He dropped out of a college prep school 3 months into it once he realized that "...it was just a social scene, with the parents paying their kids to date each other for four years."   Besides reform school, he hasn't received a 'proper education' since.

He is educated, though: politics, music, art, philosophy - this man knows his stuff.   His teachers have been street bums, jazz musicians, transvestites, politicians; his classrooms, back alleys and museums.

He very much believes that the best way to learn is simply to do the thing you want to do, not read about it.   "At school teachers try and shove knowledge down your throat, when most people learn when things are revealed while they're doing it.   That form of education goes way back from in the Bible.   It didn't say, 'they were taught,' it said, 'it was revealed to them.'

"Public education is not much more than 200 years old.   Before, schools were just places where people would hang around and discuss ideas.   You know, there's be some old wise man, like Aristotle of someone, just on the steps of a building and people would come around and listen.   But why go to school these days?   To be graded and degraded?"

His ideas on education are poignant, sensible, but most of all, terrifying.   To fall from the tightrope of formal education without a net can be downright scary.   But for Burkhart, there is a net - the understanding and trust in the cycle of life.   "Look at the birds - they don't worry about work or earning a living or being fed.   They do what comes naturally."

He recounts this sense of faith as one of his greatest successes.   "I used to worry all the time about money.   Now it just comes."   His artwork sells well, he leads drawing workshops, and is know for "The Burkhart Underground,' one of the most interesting and vibrant open mics in Chicago.   Far beyond these achievements, though, lives his greatest pride - his daughter, Trinity Valentine.

"I believe children are the greatest teachers.   My daughter blows me a way.   Kids should be teaching the adults."   He practices what he preaches.   One can still see Burkhart every Sunday night at the coffeehouse, listening to the poems and rantings of young poets and musicians - a master still learning.