My life has included numerous exciting paths. Along the way I have met many people and gained new skills and knowledge that have greatly benefited me. One path, lifelong learning, has permeated all my other paths.

My lifelong learning path started in high school and included founding the Learning Connection and co-founding the Learning Resources Network (LERN). I am very proud of each enterprise’s success and impact.

Today Melinda and I visited the Chautauqua Institute. “Chautauqua” is an Iroquois word with multiple meanings, including “a bag tied in the middle” or “two moccasins tied together.” The word describes the shape of Chautauqua Lake, located in southwest New York, which was the setting for the Chautauqua Institution, the first educational assembly in what became a significant movement at the turn of the 20th Century. 

Founded in 1874, the Chautauqua Institution focused initially on teaching and broadened to adult education of all kinds. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Chautauqua Institution was nationally known as a center for rather earnest, but high-minded, activities that aimed at intellectual and moral self-improvement and civic involvement.

As its members and graduates spread the ‘chautauqua’ idea, many towns, especially in rural areas where opportunities for secondary education were limited, established “chautauquas.” Chautauquas had a degree of cachet and became shorthand for an organized gathering intended to introduce people to the new, great ideas and issues of public concern. At the height of the Chautauqua Movement, around 1915, some 12,000 communities had hosted a chautauqua.

The Chautauqua movement nearly died in the mid-1930s. Most historians cite the rise of car culture, radio, and movies as the causes. But others point out the Depression, the rise of liberated, educated women, and an increase in fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity.

Today, chautauquas are experiencing a small renaissance. People are discovering that lifelong learning is one of the keys to living a happy, fulfilling life. Throughout North America, existing chautauquas are thriving and ones from the past are being resurrected.