What I Didn’t Know, Part I
by Rev. Peter E. Bauer
I write a lot of letters of recommendations for my students who are applying for jobs, internships, and higher education programs. There are occasions when people will ask me: “What have you learned over the course of your professional life? “Well, that is a major question and one that features a lot of nuances. Sometimes, it’s best to answer; “What I have learned is all that I still don’t know.”
Recently, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was asked to reflect upon her experiences when she studied at Princeton University. Justice Sotomayor presented at the first-ever Princeton Adelante Tigres Latino Alumni Conference.
Sotomayor, who also met with students in the morning, said that while Princeton at first felt very “alien” to her — a young woman of Puerto Rican heritage from public housing projects in the Bronx — she recognized the need to “get a lay of the land” before “jumping head-first into the pool.” She took some introductory courses to help her acclimate and gain confidence, and asked plenty of questions.
“What I learned to do at Princeton was ask questions,” she said, such as “Who’s Alice in Wonderland?” when a classmate compared her to the character from a book she had never read.
“Someone once told me that ignorance is not being dumb,” Sotomayor said. “And that’s a lesson I think most people don’t learn. Most of us confuse ignorance — not knowing something because we haven’t been exposed to it — with being stupid. And because we equate the two, we don’t figure out early on that the true dumbness in life is the unwillingness to admit ignorance. We learn socially. We learn through common shared experience.” Source: http://giving.princeton.edu/impact-stories/%C2%A1adelante-tigres-conference-celebrates-princetons-latino-alumni
I really relate to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s observation regarding ignorance and stupidity. What I have observed, and I know that I am not alone in this observation, is that if someone or an organization continues to pursue a course of direction, and is unwilling to admit what is not known — that they know everything — then the course of action is doomed to fail, smothered in hubris.
It’s also very true that ignorance is not knowing something because we haven’t been exposed to it. For me, one of those insights came during the summer of 1974. I had been awarded a scholarship fellowship to attend a scholastic theater program at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. I received well over $600, which covered my tuition and room and board. I went to classes during the day and heard well-known Shakespeare scholars lecture, and then I went to see plays performed every night in either the Elizabethan or Black Swan theaters in Ashland. What this experience taught me was that I had the ability to perform advanced scholarly work, that my ideas were important and that other people were willing to take notice regarding what I thought.
What I have also learned is that if you are in government, the military or the church, it is helpful if you have a mentor or better yet, if you have a family legacy in those institutions. In these instances, you tend to fare better regarding career advancement. People can still work very hard and can succeed without those accoutrements, but I have witnessed that those who do have these connections and this heritage benefit more.
Justice Sotomayor is right when she suggests that you’ve got to keep asking questions and challenging assumptions and biases. If learning and life development are going to mean anything, it means that humans need to constantly push themselves beyond their comfort zones and their complacency.
May this be a season in which our boundaries and our horizons can be broadened and in so doing, deepen the meaning of our lives.
May it be so.
