As a retired college professor, I should know how difficult it is to share knowledge. Teaching isn't easy, regardless of what you're trying to teach, and it's even more difficult when you're trying to teach something people don't really want to learn. After spending some 35 years in the college classroom, I'm convinced that most college students aren't there to learn. They're there to punch their ticket, get a diploma and a jump on job market opportunities. They care little about what a decent education can do to enrich their lives. Life is difficult enough for the educated person, much less for someone who's burdened with ignorance. You'd think, therefore, that education would be an easy sell, but it isn't. Sharing wisdom you've acquired through education and various life experiences is even a more difficult sell. Nobody, it seems, wants to pay anything for wisdom, and perhaps that's why we live around so many people who don't have it.
I hear a lot of talk about common sense, the ignorant person's fallback education. Book learning can't replace good old fashioned common sense, so goes the belief is such nonsense. And yes, it's true that a lot of people with little or no education have somehow found ways to survive using this practical knowledge. They have this practical knowledge, this common sense, because they've had no choice but to work at acquiring it. How smart to you have to be to drive a nail into a board, dig a ditch or post hole, fix a lawnmower, paint a barn, or do anything that requires little more than effort? No very, that's for sure, but figuring out how to build an entire house takes something common sense can't provide - an advanced knowledge about carpentry. The carpenter perhaps didn't learn the trade through normal educational channels, but someone had to teach him. Few mechanics get good at it without instruction of some kind, and that's not common sense. Wisdom, whether or not it comes from formal education or learning practical sense way, is something we should all treasure. But we don't, at least not until we reach a level of maturity where wisdom becomes important to us.
I'm old, well educated, and wise. Most of my wisdom comes through reading, study, and formal education. But I haven't always learned that way, and much of what I call wisdom has been acquired from living a long time. If you live long enough, and if you've put yourself in the path of various influences, you learn a lot just from experience. That's real common sense, not a fools fallback excuse for not knowing much of anything else. And as it turns out, much of what I've learned that has helped make me a wise man has come through the multitude of mistakes I've made along the way. I've tried a lot of things, and there's no way you get good at anything without practice. Want to be a good guitar player? Practice, and not just a few minutes a day. If you've got a day free to practice, do so until your fingers get sore. That will make a guitar player out of you . . . well, almost. You've still got to study music, develop style, hang with the good players, and go at it with determination. Want to be a good college professor? The same rules apply.
I've been retired from teaching now for 14 years, and I'm loving retirement. My time is my own now, all the time I need to write novels, play guitar, build stringed instruments, do work around the house . . . just anything that strikes my fancy. And I enjoy this time because over the years I learned how to do a lot of things. Learning those things (and failing to learn other things) has made me a much wiser man that I would've been had I relied on common sense. Yeah, I'd be one of those good old boys who watches Fox News, goes to coffee in the morning with other old unwise guys who talk about things they know nothing of. I hear it all the time. Common sense guys . . . dumbasses almost to the letter. And now that I'm old and fairly secure and wise enough to share some important things with younger people, I have no inclination to do so. That's one thing I've often failed at. Learning something new just isn't something most people want, and getting wiser sure isn't on their agenda either. I know this from experience. I still remember the words of a wise and well-educated mentor from many years ago: "You can't hang flowered curtains in a mule barn and expect the mule to appreciate them."
I gave up on education a long time ago, but I didn't lose faith in it. Now that I no longer feel compelled to share what I know, I'm content with just having it. In fact, I still feel like I don't know enough, and so the inquiry through study continues. And when I lose interest in that, I'll be cooling down and turning stiff.
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