“Go to tech school,” say a new crop of Facebook memes.”Fill jobs we need. Make good money!”
I agree that a vocational education is right for a lot of people and they deserve our respect.
My Dad taught me Ohm’s law years before I studied algebra. He taught electrical code to aspiring electricians. I have a lot of respect for an electrician’s brains.
My mother’s brother was a mason. Not the kind who wear funny hats. The kind who build brick walls. That looks simple to someone who never tried it. It’s like Legos, right? Try digging and leveling a foundation. Then lay the bricks in a straight line without a crack between them. Oh! and make sure it lasts fifty years.
I respect the amount of money people with a technical education can make. My brother earned a two-year degree in Agricultural Mechanics. He is a modest guy, but I suspect that he has made more money than his four siblings put together. And they all have graduate degrees.
I also know that some people are a lot happier working in the trades. The best mechanic who ever touched my car was a guy who had a law degree.
So, I see these postings by my friends and I agree with them until I get to the line that says, “Don’t waste your money.” The implication is that going to a four-year college, particularly if you major in liberal arts, is a waste.
Maybe they are right. I learned to read the New Testament in Greek. But, the guy who read the blueprints for an addition to my church drove a pickup that cost more than I made in two years. Some would say my education was a waste.
I also know a lot of people who have advanced degrees, whose education was a waste. I’m not talking about the guy with a PhD. in Ugaritic who now drives for Uber. I mean the people whose only question was, “Will this be on the test?” They did not learn the two things that we ought to take from any educational experience.
The first thing is learning how to learn.
When I was in school, I wrote a ton of research papers. The topics would put you to sleep if I listed them. The topics were completely irrelevant to anything I did later in life. But those papers taught me three skills:
1. How to ask the right questions.
2. Where to look for answers.
3. When do you know enough to act?
These skills are relevant, not just to researching a paper on the ancient city of Antioch. (I told you they were boring) But in changing a light fixture, making a decision, or doing brain surgery.
Once, I was helping our son, Matt, put in a new overhead light in his dining room. My father had taught me how to turn off the circuit breaker first. Matt got on the step ladder and removed the screws from the old fixture and let it down. The new fixture only had two wires on it. We expected to see two wires come out of the ceiling. But there were three dangling down. Why? (Right Question).
I knew where to find the answer. While I was detaching the old fixture from the wires, I asked Matt to call his grandfather. My Dad had two questions, “What do you see?” and “When was the house built?” When Matt answered those questions, my Dad knew what we were dealing with. (See note below)
And, when we knew what the third wire was, and what to do with it, we could act.
That’s the third skill, knowing that you know enough to take action. Without knowing enough, we make stupid mistakes. By trying to know everything, we get lost in the paralysis of analysis. One of my professors told me, “When the books you are reading are quoting the books you have read, you have covered the subject.”
Good advice for an academic. But, it also worked when making the decisions that congregations have to make. When stuff was not working, we had to ask, why? (right question). We asked what others were doing. We formulated a tentative plan. We listened to suggestions and arguments pro and con. When we stopped hearing new suggestions and arguments, we were ready to act.
My ENT surgeon knew when she had looked at enough X-rays and CaT scans before she inserted a cochlear implant through my skull into my inner ear. I also know that she was prepared in case something unexpected came up, because . . .
The second thing is learning how much you do not know
It is one thing to search until you know enough to act. It is another thing to think you know it all. There is always more to know. That is the most important thing anyone can ever take away from any kind of education.
I met a man who taught an advanced course in Electricity at Rochester Institute of Technology. He said he always asked the students on the first day of the course to answer the question: “What is electricity.”
The students talked about the movement of electrons, positive and negative polarities, conduction, induction, etc.
After a semester of intense study, he asked the same question.
The students shook their heads and said, “We don’t know.”
I don’t care if you are working in your field five years after graduation. I don’t care if your salary is bigger than Bill Gate’s. I don’t care if you are President of the United States. If you think you know everything, your education, whatever it was, was a waste.
The most important thing an education can teach you is how much you don’t know. It costs a lot to go to Harvard. It costs even more to go to the School of Hard Knocks. Other colleges and tech schools may be more affordable. The fact that so many are so expensive that only the rich or the supersmart can attend is a problem we must solve.
But, if you learn humility, your education will be worth everything it cost.
Note: My grandson, Benjamin was about three-years-old then. While Matt was on the phone with my father, Benjamin handed me a screwdriver that I had dropped. This raised another question: How many generations of Talbotts does it take to change a lightbulb?
Brilliant, Roger! Love it!
Bravo! Another fun read. 🙃🤗
Thanks Deidre, good to hear from you!
The most important thing i learned is to keep learning!
The most important thing i learned is to keep learning! I am amazed that those in my field stopped when thy got their MDiv.
That’s the truth.