The kids and I had an interesting discussion last night on the way home from our bible study about the frustration of learning difficult things. We talked about three frustrations in particular even though I do not think we identified them specifically in a neat little list while we talked about them. The frustrations were that some topics are 1) too vast to know everything about them (politics, economics, world religions), 2) too complicated to understand without lots of intense effort over months or years of study (mathematics, quantum mechanics, object oriented programming), and 3) too agenda filled to get to the truth from any one source (stem cell research, global warming, Christianity, homosexuality). Many people are comfortable with what they know either because “they do not know what they do not know” or they do not feel a need to improve on the knowledge they already have.
Kelly started the conversation when she said, “Dad, you know why you believe stuff, but there are lots of things like economics, wars in different places, and other stuff like that, that I want to know about, but I am not so interested that I am willing to read a lot about them. I know if I read World Magazine from cover to cover, I would know a lot more about those things than I do. I try to do that, but I get really bored and end up only reading half or a quarter of the articles that don’t interest me.”
I gave her my standard lecture about how difficult it was for me to make the switch from sequential programming in C to object oriented programming in C++. There was just too much stuff to learn all at once. No one item is difficult by itself, but one has to get their arms around a ton of those not so difficult items all at once to make any sense of the whole. One of the older guys saw my frustration and recommended I get my hands on several books and, more importantly start reading one of the programming trade rags (Dr. Dobbs Journal) on a regular basis.
He said, “There will be a lot of confusing information in those articles, but if you just skim through them, even if you do not understand what you read, you will have engaged with the vocabulary and one or two of the concepts for the topics. Each time you read through the magazine, you will understand more of what you read. Pretty soon, you will not only understand the stuff with which you are frustrated now, but you will be able to pick up brand new material more easily. Mostly, remember that you will be confused when you get started on something new. Just do not let that confusion frustrate you.”
That advise served me well. We then talked about some of things Kelly had learned just that way, the most recent of which were probably knitting and Geometry, but which also includes riding a bicycle, reading, piano playing, intelligent design, analysis of world views, comic drawing, desktop publishing, and a broad range of other items. The thing that might be a little different now is that the topics are getting broader and have people with different agendas demanding adherence to their viewpoints to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
So, in addition to the frustration of learning complex or vast things, there is the problem of knowing what is really true. We then talked about the importance of knowing what we do not know. We remembered some discussions with people who expressed very strong opinions based on false premises. I explained that I have held (and probably still hold) very strong opinions that I based on false assumptions. I told her that, in discerning what is true, our first attachment must be to love of God, then truth, but that they really go hand in hand in every circumstance if we take them deep enough. This is a discussion I expect and hope will be an on-going one. I know it was helpful for me to think about it.
