We’re too specialized too young: too focused on a single point to spread out and learn outside our specialty, concerned only with what immediately affects our path, unwilling to observe the periphery.
It’s starting to get to me.
I’ve worked with a couple of people so focused on what they did as college students – and both of them were recent graduates – that they didn’t know anything outside of their field. These are the people who stock your used bookstores. They don’t know Daniel Pinkwater or William Sleator. They don’t know Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Milton Friedman. Which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter. Unless, and this is important, you’re responsible for keeping a general-interest bookstore stocked and your only real guideline for buying is avoiding things you haven’t heard of.
This got me thinking about who I wouldn’t have heard of, if I didn’t make an effort to know things outside my major. Mo Yan. Bao Ninh. William Goyen. Michael Parenti. It would never have occurred to me to read W. Somerset Maugham or G. K. Chesterton if people I worked with hadn’t handed them to me. (Speaking of which, Maugham’s spy novel is pretty awesome.) If my co-worker hadn’t said I should try Absalom, Absalom so many times I got tired of listening to her rave about how awesome it was, I’d probably still hate Faulkner. The best classes I took in college were outside of my major, and they’re why I have John Donne and William Crashaw and Juvaini’s History of the World Conqueror. Why would you limit yourself like that?
Maybe I’m strange, but I like learning. I like taking all the disparate threads of everything I can read, and turning them into part of how I look at the world. (I love being able to pick up Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul and read the bit about Lucius Varenus and Titus Pullo.) Is it any wonder that what I want to do is teach? I’d like to share this awesome, fabulous wealth of fascinating history and amazing art with, well, everybody who’ll listen.
I wouldn’t mind teaching art history to five year olds. That is an amazing thing to watch.
If more people approached learning with joy, maybe we’d haul ourselves out of some of the cultural quagmires left over from nineteenth century industrial society. Just a thought.
I don’t think of myself as an expert on anything, really, but I’ve got my moments. And, really, that’s what teaching is about – being a student of learning. I don’t know if that really makes sense, but what I mean is that teaching something often makes me better at it. It forces me to think about the basics, the things I might not always remember are even there, and the better I know the foundation of something, the better I am at building on top of it. So there I am, better at what I do, having just given someone else the foundation to do it too.
It’s not about competition. Competition, in a lot of contexts, isn’t conducive to growth. Particularly in my kind of creative endeavors, things work better with cooperation and community.
I’m not sure how I got from over-specialization to cooperation. I think, perhaps, that part of the problem with specialization is that you lose sight of what you can gain from collaborating with people who work in fields outside of your own. There’s something to be said for thinking outside your comfort zone, anyway. (Which is why I’m a little bit concerned that maybe I need to go learn some serious math. I missed something along the way; it sounds like the subject gets incredibly fascinating and awesome once you’ve gotten past the pesky stuff they torture you with in high school.)
