Learning Through Involvement

Griffin Pitt ('26) reflects on her time at Penn and in the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program. Griffin was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and the President of the BFS Undergraduate Advisory Board, an SNF Paideia Fellow, an Environmental Economics Research Fellow at The Water Center, and much more. She writes on the importance in exploring opportunities and experiential learning. Griffin is a recipient of the Thouron Award and is currently at Oxford pursuing her Masters of Science in Water Science, Policy and Management.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” As the founder of the University of Pennsylvania, it seems fitting – a man who built an institution on the premise that knowledge should be useful, practical, and earned. I’ve thought about that line a lot over the last three years. I’ve thought about it pushing a red bicycle on the way to rowing practice. I’ve thought about it in southeastern Kenya, watching water move through sand, and central Peru on the precipice of the Andes. I’ve thought about it in county government meetings in North Carolina, trying to explain an economic model to people who needed it to actually work. I don't think I understood it, though, until I stopped just being taught.

Sophomore year, I enrolled in a BFS Seminar, ENVS 1650 – The Role of Water in Urban Sustainability and Resiliency – taught by Howard Neukrug, the former Philadelphia Water Commissioner. Howard had spent thirty years inside the actual machinery of a city’s water system, and he arrived to class each day not with a lecture so much as a transmission. He would say something like let’s get started and then simply tell you things – about pipe failures, about political pressure, about what it costs, financially and otherwise, to keep 1.5 million people’s water running. You felt, sitting there, that you were receiving something irreplaceable. The kind of knowledge that doesn’t survive being flattened into slides.

It was halfway through that semester that I made the small, impulsive decision that changed the next three years of my life. I looked up the Water Center at Penn’s website and found they were offering a fellowship in my home watershed. I was a sophomore with no relevant experience. But I had, by then, developed what I think is the most underrated skill a student can have: a certain shamelessness about asking for things. So when I saw Howard leaving McNeil one afternoon, I pushed my bicycle alongside him down Locust Walk and asked if he’d take a chance on me. He said yes.

What followed wasn't a continuation of my education in any familiar sense. I spent three years on consulting projects: economic evaluations of watersheds in the Carolinas, conversations with municipalities and private utilities, the slow and unglamorous work of translating research into something a county government might actually use. None of it appeared on a syllabus. All of it taught me things the classroom couldn’t, not because the classroom had failed, but because there is a category of knowledge that only becomes available when the stakes are real.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a simple argument against sitting in rooms and reading books. Two other Benjamin Franklin Scholars seminars asked me to spend serious time with Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and with the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace — neither obviously relevant to my major, both essential to understanding how systems hold together, and how they come apart. Being made to learn things you didn’t choose, to sit with discomfort, to accumulate context you can’t yet use: that matters too. The classroom isn't the enemy of learning. It’s just not the whole of it.

What I keep returning to is the walk down Locust Walk with a bicycle and the specific, slightly anxious feeling of asking a question that wasn’t about a grade. That moment of involvement – of stepping into something larger than a requirement – is the thing that changes you. Penn made it possible, and the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program made it more possible. 

I’ve since learned that the quote “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn” isn't Franklin’s. It most likely descends from the Xunzi, a collection of writings by the Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang, who lived and thought in China somewhere between 312 and 230 BC. Franklin, for his part, never said it. But Xun Kuang was right, even if Franklin gets the credit. You learn by being involved. The question is just whether you’re willing to ask.

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