Humility and Education, Part II

A key point in my intellectual and academic development arrived many years ago, several years removed from graduate school.  I was, as they say, "burned out."  I still remember how depressed I felt in the summer of 1980 as I spent day after day on the 4th floor of PLC at the University of Oregon, reading 1,000 pages or more of books that I believed I needed to master to be a decent historian.  I had no plan opening the books, other than to learn everything in them.  I took no notes.  And of course I remember very little of their content.  I do remember how much I hated the whole thing.  But I believed that such discipline was necessary to master my subjects, my fields.  A scholar should be master of her or his subjects.

Some years later, the blessed day arrived when it occurred to me that knowledge is like an ocean.  It's so large that it might as well be infinite, and every little droplet or bit or ecosystem is connected to countless other complicated systems.  But every little piece of it is also endlessly fascinating.  The closer you look, the more you realize that. It's a pleasure to dip into it, even if--or maybe because--you constantly run up against limitations of intellect and time.

Learning undertaken with a deeper appreciation of the immensity of the subject and my own (human and personal) limitations has been much more enjoyable.  When mastery is out of the question, the mind is free to explore, secure in the knowledge that one's knowledge is always incomplete and subject to revision.  I believe that this approach also helps with my teaching, as I can sincerely assure my students that I may or may know much more about a subject than they do, but that both of us really know very little and are both in the same boat, so to speak.