Knowing not knowing

From two years ago. (I care about this stuff enough to dream changes to it.)

In a dream, the idea presented vivid and complete:

an institution of higher learning whose mission and conceit was grounded in the foundational values of secular humanism, and whose primary content inculcated and nourished a set of competencies, themselves foundational to learning of every kind: self-guided, experiential, applied, instructor-led.

The argument unfolded, as always, over what was worth knowing. I contended that there were things we should know, better and in greater numbers than we do now. But it occurred to me that, even in disciplines ostensibly structured around practices, over time the answer to the question sediments as "what is known."

This seemed to me to be part of the problem, and serves as leverage for "reformers" who (rightly) descry traditional approaches and inherited assumptions and insist (wrongly) that we abandon them altogether, typically for a role- or activity-specific training model. The baby/bathwater tendencies we have--throwing out what feels broken or no longer useful rather than repairing or retrofitting it for new uses--occasion a loss as profound as a blindered insistence on doing things as we always have.

Another metaphor: taking a new path (presented to us as unworn and adventurous but more often the pat reflection of some other, just-as-narrow, just-as-popularized conception of what is needed) for its novelty would likely lead us astray as thoroughly as sticking with the well-worn path because of its familiarity.*

Both approaches, I argued, are a matter of comfort for their advocates: that we stick with what we know, brand it "best practice" or "essential learning" when it is actually only what we have come to think or accept, allowing us to proceed on our own assumptions and conclusions with the self-assurance of the righteous.

My proposal, then, was that we dispense with our fixation on either knowledge or skill bases for their own sakes and adopt "knowing" bases as the structural frame and purpose of our college/polytechnic/university course/program/experience/outcome: the ability to question, consider, investigate, reason, apply, test, compound, and improve what is known as a work without end, including the art and science of learning itself.

Here the things "worth knowing" in and of themselves are apertures into knowing itself: examples, cases, concepts; to be examined, discussed, debated, critiqued and (if still useful) applied; but not rigid foundations for thought or even necessarily anchoring points for thinking.

I proposed that people with carefully and organically developed and developing critical and creative faculties, with curious minds and broad bases of understanding and knowledge, but who know not to rest too comfortably on past or current theory--to make use of it, but to also calibrate or question that use constantly--would be the greatest "product" and outcome of whatever teaching we could do.

They would need support, yes, in developing core understanding and in exploring their ideas and answering their questions, but as guidance through a process and a question, not to a foreordained, familiar conclusion.

Their teacher-mentors would therefore be persons of profound humility, not arrogance or ego, assured of their grasp of what is known, but willing and indeed anxious to lead others past that boundary, and then to lead or join or follow them beyond it.

In other words, the dream showed me the whole, the vivid, the too-infrequently felt and heard heart of human teaching, learning, and knowing.

*Don't believe me? Go read Frost's "The Road Less Taken," then read it again. It doesn't, per Inigo Montoya, "mean what you think it means."