The Critical Finger

I was recently reminded of a past student of mine who would regularly object to various things I taught. The grounds of his objections were as follows: Everything you teach is very simple and easy to understand and doesn't contradict the general experiences of a person. In fact you normally cite life experiences that most people can relate to as evidence of that which you teach. But because of this, the things you teach are basically things that people already know. Therefore, because the things you teach are already known to a person, they cannot possibly be valuable to them.

This reasoning is actually quite hilarious, because it seems to imply that the only person who could potentially learn anything from what I write is the person who is isn't intelligent enough to have learned these things on their own. Thus, if you have learned anything at all from this blog, my student would no doubt label you as one example of such a person.

Still, I believe the student's argument to be naïve at best. My appeal to a person's “general life experience” is, in many ways, a concrete method of relating to them. It definitely helps the reader/student to better grasp whatever it is that I'm talking about. But it does not follow that, because I have appealed to the life experience of a person, and then proceeded to make a connection or observation on the basis of that experience, that the person will have already made that same connection or observation prior to my relating it to them.

As an example, consider the concept of fear. Nearly everyone can perform some action which they were once (but no longer) afraid to do. To borrow from the previous post, during “driver's ed” many people are afraid to drive a car on the road amongst other automobiles, especially if they have no experience driving things. Yet after years of having their drivers license and operating a vehicle, they display no fear whatsoever when driving. Such is an example that many people relate to. But many have not made the connection that in order to overcome a fear, they must do that which they are afraid to do, and when they do that, they expand their comfort zone, and their fear begins to subside. Such an observation is, for many people, a kind of revelation or epiphany which enables them to better face and overcome fears throughout their life, and if that is in fact the case, surely they wouldn't accuse me of “teaching them something they already knew.”

On the other hand, perhaps the said student—albeit at the midpoint of his teenage years—had already figured out everything worth knowing.