Curiosity at the Center of One's Life: Statements and Questions of R. Eric O'Connor

Chris Redmond is Director of Internal Communications at the University
of Waterloo.

The size, shape, weight, and colour of a brick, this volume certainly contains much valuable material about the worth of humanity and about the philosophy of continuing education in Canada. Perhaps it will be especially welcome to those to whom it is dedicated: “the hundreds of learners who will recognize they have been touched by this unique person.”

Unfortunately, the editors have done little to make the book useful or appealing to any other reader, who will even have trouble identifying who Eric O’Connor was and why he might be important. A Jesuit priest, one gleans, or finds in a well-hidden chronology of his life; a mathematician; a founder of Montreal’s Thomas More Institute for Adult Education. Some summary of his work and a page-long assessment of his contributions to adult education in Canada would be a valuable introduction at the front of the book; the existing introduction is strikingly unhelpful.

One can be similarly unhappy about the ensuing 500 pages of O’Connor’s collected speeches, writings, and radio interviews. The volume is really a source book, with the material roughly arranged, and each item labeled but not at all explained. Ideas do come through, such as O’Connor’s conviction that mature adults make the best learners, and his interest in the connections between mathematics and morality. But the reader gets little help in exploring these ideas. Frequently it seems that material is here not because it was chosen but because it was available. In one fat section, O’Connor is little more than the interviewer; the ideas come from another Jesuit whose identity is not really explained, Bernard Lonergan.

In transcribing long periods of radio conversation unedited, and in choosing an awkward and ugly typography, the editors have done something of a disservice to their subject, whose ideas doubtless deserve much better.