Embracing the joys of learning

When Myrna Blyth walks across the stage on Monday to accept her master's degree, it will be a celebration of her love of learning in its purest form.

Back in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while much of the rest of New York was learning to bake sourdough bread, Blyth channeled her boredom with the remote-work-by-day, streamfest-by-night routine into applying to the Master of Liberal Arts program at Johns Hopkins' Advanced Academic Programs.

Image caption: Myrna Blyth

She got in, but not without requesting her original undergraduate records from Bennington College in Vermont. To her amusement, they arrived typewritten—she'd earned her bachelor's degree in 1960. Now 86, Blyth is one of Hopkins' oldest graduates this year.

Senior vice president and editorial director of AARP Media, Blyth had never had the time or need to pursue an advanced degree before. Her resume and credentials needed no polish: She was previously editor in chief and publishing director of Ladies Home Journal, founding editor and publishing director of More magazine, and the author of four books. Instead, spurred by pandemic restlessness, the part-time New Yorker, part-time D.C. resident looked at the four advanced degrees her two sons have between them, and realized she was ready.

While some aspects of school were familiar from the last time around—the first short story she read in her 20th century lit class was the same one she'd read first in her undergrad lit class: James Joyce's "Araby"—many were unexpected. Footnoted papers, for example, ceded some of their sway to assignments involving photos, videos, and audio.

But the biggest change was more abstract. "In a funny way, this was less purposeful but more meaningful," Blyth says. "I didn't have any purpose taking this degree. It wasn't going to do anything in terms of my career or anything like that. But it was more meaningful, because I could enjoy learning."

In her American political theory course, Blyth re-read The Federalist Papers and recognized the foundations of current turns of events: "It may not be exactly what the founders expected or wanted, but the possibility of the arguments the President is having at the moment is in the construction of our government," she says.

In a course on leadership in the classics, she reflected on the ongoing dialogue about leadership she has with colleagues at AARP, noting both the "leadership business" that exists today and that we've been exploring the topic since Plato.

When the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks occurred in Israel, Blyth found extra meaning in the course she happened to be taking on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In her next course, on contemporary fiction, she drew on what she'd learned about the Holocaust to re-tell the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel, setting them in Eastern Europe in 1941. "That was part of the interrelationship of things, which is part of liberal arts," Blyth says. Her short story trio was just published in Confluence, the journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, which Blyth was inducted into this year.

And then came the assignment that tied all nine courses together and gave Blyth's degree its deepest meaning: the portfolio. Students who choose this option for their final project (the others are a thesis or an internship) must provide evidence of learning and intellectual growth, and exhibit mastery of learning outcomes. While Blyth encourages anyone to take courses that interest them, she particularly recommends seeking a formal degree because of the rigorous analysis and synthesis required to show that you've grasped the material.

"There is something about really taking a degree and proving that you understand what you've learned to professors whose job is to teach you to understand," she says. "It really does make you realize what you learned from what you did."

And that was always the point for Blyth—learning. There's value in cultivating knowledge because you enjoy it, not because you need it, she says. And it makes her younger in the sense that it opens her to new perspectives. "The most important thing is that I really do like learning," she says. "And I think that's hard to remember, that learning in and of itself is helpful and interesting."

She likes it so much that she's currently taking a course on The Iliad at the University of Chicago, and when she retires from AARP in June, she's considering pursuing a PhD. But what's more likely next on her plate is a return to writing. When you spend your days reading other people's work—and she's been doing that since her days of editing her high school and college newspapers—it's a challenge to write your own work. She may be moving on from AARP, but she still has a lot to say on the topic of aging.

"I'm very interested in writing about aging honestly, which virtually no one does," Blyth says. "People are either super-agers jumping out of airplanes at 103, or talking about illness, and it's really somewhere in between. It's a complicated experience, like adolescence."