What Does It Really Mean to Learn?
I read “Middlemarch” for the first time during my sophomore year of college. I didn’t get it. Why would Dorothea, a young and intelligent woman, marry that annoying old man? How could she be so stupid? No one else in the class seemed to get it, either, and this pushed our professor over the edge. “Of course you don’t understand,” he roared, swilling a Diet Coke. “Trust me, you’ll read this book again when you’re forty, after your first divorce, and you’ll say, ‘Oh, I see!’ ”
Arguably, it’s one of the tragedies of humanities education that so much of it occurs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. We don’t teach people to drive at twelve, when they’re carless; why should we make them read novels about life’s regrets when they have none? Yet there’s a theory behind the assignment of “Middlemarch” to sophomores: it’s that knowledge acquired too early gets stored away. Patterns of thinking established now will be retraced later; ideas encountered first in art will prime us for the rest of life. This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a charging bear, because you never know. In the mid-twentieth century, Toyota pioneered a methodology called just-in-time manufacturing, according to which car parts were constructed and delivered as close as possible to the hour of assembly. This was maximally efficient because it reduced waste and the cost of storage. But the human mind doesn’t work that way. Knowledge must often molder in our mental warehouses for decades until we figure out what to do with it.
Leslie Valiant, an eminent computer scientist who teaches at Harvard, sees this as a strength. He calls our ability to learn over the long term “educability,” and in his new book, “The Importance of Being Educable,” he argues that it’s key to our success. When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” We need to build capacious and flexible theories about the world—theories that will serve us in new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances—and we do that by gathering diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, additive, serendipitous way, and knitting them together. Through this process, we acquire systems of beliefs that are broader and richer than the ones we can create through direct personal experience. This is how, after our first divorce, we find that we can draw on wisdom borrowed from English literature.
