YWValues: Knowledge

Of course this is my favorite of all of the values: it was also (rather arbitrarily) assigned my favorite color that's actually a color (black and silver don't count, apparently). Go, Slytherin.

The Church has always encouraged girls and women to get as much education as they can. It's sound economic advice, and a good recipe for the progress of a culture still planted firmly in traditional gender roles. What pleases me most is that it flies directly in the face of Rousseau's "train a girl to be the perfect wife" model which leaves her helpless and destitute if she doesn't find a husband (a fact pointed out by an incensed Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Women), and leaves her and her children stupid if she doesn't find a husband capable of willing to undo decades of careful ignorance training.

I actually had a well-meaning neighbor tell me once that if my Master's degree made it difficult for me to find a husband, did I really want a PhD?

Yes. Yes, I do.*

Learning does not always require formal teaching, although formalizing it really helps. The only thing you really need to keep learning is a squishy brain. Life itself will always provide opportunities to advance in knowledge - and there are lots of different kinds of knowledge.** As we get older, we become more confident in our experiences and ideologies. We have spent a lifetime honing our opinions, and we trust ourselves and begin dismissing anyone who disagrees. This brain calcification causes all kinds of social problems. It also solves a few of them.

I believe that there are times when a brain should be hard, and times when it should be soft. Like a body, parts should bend and squish and move over (no, the womb does not wander, no matter what your Victorian medical text tells you), and parts should hold firm: bones, calves, tendons. Too often, we leave which parts are which up to chance (and pizza and Netflix). Brains need exercise so that we can use our agency to CHOOSE to make the right parts move or not move, respectively. We can decide when we should listen, and decide when we can discard input as unconstructive. We can keep the fun butt-jiggle and soft sitting-down bits, but turn our arms into pure baby-lifting muscle. Or however we want our brains to work.

Keeping a squishy brain means being able to admit when we are wrong. It means having humility to understand that we can be wrong any time. It means being able to apologize when you realize you were wrong. Not all of the knowledge that we have acquired is correct, and in addition to humility, we need to be able to think critically and HONESTLY about our learning process: what makes us trust a fact? How do our feelings change how we process or express facts? The great Sherlock Holmes taught us to never theorize before the facts, but we do: constantly. The real trick is to be willing to overwrite our wrong conclusions.

If we cannot admit ignorance or error, we cannot learn.

And yet, the Truth is not subjective: anything that is real, is real for everyone. You can believe really, really hard that the thing in front of your car is not a tree, but you'll still hit it if you don't brake soon.*** Learning requires that we figure out how to sort facts, and that we hold off on classifying our pet theories as immutable laws. It means really listening to others in the good faith that they believe what they are saying for what they believe are good reasons.

Bonus: if you're a grown-up, sometimes you get to choose what you learn next.

*Besides, it's not the degrees that scare men off; it's my scathing glare and biting wit. Not to mention the sheer mass of me. I'm too much woman for too many men. *wicked grin*

**And books are still a thing, people.

***please don't read my blog while driving.