Learning the New, Unlearning the Old

I’m working on a Master’s Degree, and the final step will be writing a 100-page thesis. (A daunting task for a guy who has spent large chunks of his life writing three-paragraph ads, 30-second television commercials, and 60-second radio spots. Much of what I’ve written has taken just one page.)

There’s actually a class on Research Methods, which helps us learn how to define the subject, do the research, organize the material, and write the paper. Reading one of the textbooks the other day (Your Guide to Writing Quality Research Papers by Nancy Jean Vyhmeister, which is actually – surprisingly – interesting) I came across this quote from Ellen White, written in 1892: “We have many lessons to learn, and many, many to unlearn.”

That sentence caused me to pull out my yellow highlighter. As did the one a line or two later: “Those who think that they will never have to give up a cherished view… will be disappointed.”

I usually think of education as learning new stuff, to pile on the mound of things I already know. But what if some of the timbers in my intellectual foundation are outdated, or insufficient, or flat-out wrong? It may only be a matter of time before there’s some sort of collapse. At best, it could be embarrassing; at worst, a disaster.

Learning, as Ms. White points out, should force us to unlearn as well as learn.

That can be difficult, for two reasons. First, we cherish the “truths” we already have gained, through study or experience. It’s hard to let them go, even when new discoveries and new situations render them false or irrelevant. But second, and quite insidiously, we sometimes don’t even recognize the building blocks of our own intellectual infrastructure. They are comfortable, assumed, unexamined. In the same way that fish don’t know they’re wet, we don’t recognize the assumptions and biases that we’ve acquired along the way.

So how do we unlearn?

Perhaps it takes an attitude and an action.

The attitude would be just a touch of humility. Just a glimmer of an admission to ourselves that we don’t know it all, and that some of what we know might be outdated or incomplete. We keep our ears slightly cocked to hear the warnings that there might be some creaking or sagging in our foundation.

The action would be to force ourselves to encounter information from different sources. Here are just a couple examples. In my work in advertising, I’ve noticed that companies tend to pay attention to the efforts of other entities in their same category – car dealers notice the ads of other car dealers, churches pay attention to what other churches are doing, etc. One secret is to cross-pollinate. Look at the ads outside your industry (after all, your customers are). When I ran the marketing for a Christian university on the west coast, our efforts at a new web design started with looking at many of the sites our prospective students might visit. We looked at the sites of other Christian universities in our category, of course, but then, step by step, we widened the net, step by step. First, bigger universities, state universities, and universities in other areas. Then we looked at Pepsi, Scion, ESPN, even Hollister and Abercrombine and Fitch.

Here’s another example. In my personal life, as a follower of Jesus Christ, I want to avoid the cultural myopia that can sneak up on us. In addition to reading contemporary authors from my home country, the United States, I also try to read authors from other countries and from other centuries. (Often, you can get two birds with one book. Try, for example, something by St. Augustine. He lived in Africa in the fourth century, and today is highly regarded by Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox Church.)

So, thanks, Ms. White, for pointing out that “unlearning” can be just as important as “learning.” It makes sense. Adding new software requires deleting the old. You have to find, cut out, and replace the rotten timbers on your sailing vessel before it’s again seaworthy and can be trusted to embark on your next voyage.