INSTRUCTING THE IGNORANT

We all know people who don’t know what they don’t know even as they act at times as if they do know what they really don’t know. The truth be told, each of us could probably add ourselves to that list of sometimes know-it-alls. No one has all knowledge, is all-knowing. That is simply a fact of our human existence. We all would wish to know more than we know. Knowledge is power, not in the sense of being able to use our knowledge to make others look foolish, but in order to be a better person.

Of course, people do abuse others when they deliberately and gleefully make others look foolish because they are ignorant of the issue on the table. That is certainly not a way to win friends and influence people. But, then, those who act that way don’t seem to have any regrets on the way they abuse their knowledge. The glee that those who are abused comes when those people get his comeuppance. They always do sooner or later.

On the more positive side, although it seems negative to us who are experiencing it, is the fact that when we have lost some knowledge that we once had, there are those who will help us remember. We not only learn more and more as we grow older, we also forget more and more as we grow older, or at least take a much longer time to retrieve from our brains what we once stored there. Such is life.

All that said, it is the responsibility of each of us to help others learn what we have learned, both from book-learning and from personal experience. Our elders did that for us. We learned from them even as we often believed we knew more than they did especially when we were teenagers. What teenager does not think he or she is smarter than his or her parents? They’ll learn the hard way, as we all do.

It is difficult to try to teach those whom we know do not know something we believe they need to know. They, as we did, often take it as a put-down rather than a helping-up. Teachers help lift us up from ignorance to knowledge. We know they know more than we do. We come to them to learn from them. Once we have learned what they have to teach, then it is up to us to teach others what we have learned.

The further difficulty that we have both as teachers and learners is that we bring prior experience and prior prejudices with us that color both the way we teach and the way we accept the teaching of others. That is what makes both teaching and learning so very difficult at times, the know-it-alls notwithstanding.

Yet as difficult as it is to teach others and learn from others, that is one of the responsibilities we have both as human beings and even more so as Christians. Jesus was killed because of his teachings. They made too many people, especially those in power, very uncomfortable. The truth hurts and it often makes us uncomfortable. But we have an obligation both teach and to learn no matter how uncomfortable it gets at times.