Intellectual Confidence

“The concept of intellectual confidence is the belief that if exposed to knowledge a person can learn almost anything. It is not a belief that is rooted in the knowledge that an individual possess at any given time but in the idea that there exists a fundamental capability to learn”.

When I was still in my teens my father got me admitted to the Lather’s Union as an apprentice and I began to work in the construction industry. My apprenticeship was similar to most in that it was the process of learning the trade punctuated by all levels of verbal abuse from the journeymen teaching the skills. The trade was not difficult to learn, that would be mastered over time; the difficulty was that the nasty gauntlet to be navigated to full journeymanship was manned by those already established journeymen who felt that it was necessary and fun to ridicule and demean all apprentices. One of the most egregious offenders was a man nicknamed “Corky”. I had some verbal altercations with him but I also came to respect his abilities. I remember telling my father about Corky and being very complimentary about his ability to build elevator shafts. Upon this revelation my father just looked at me and said, “Corky is as good as he will ever be. If you want to be better than him you can be. Just watch him, learn all that he knows and then improve on it”. I did not see it as simple as my father projected but over the years I did watch Corky and I did learn. Ten years later I was working on a high-rise hotel in downtown San Francisco. My cousin Steven and I, now journeymen ourselves, were building the elevator shaft. Coincidentally, Corky, along with his partner, were building a section of the same shaft on a different floor. At break time I went down to get something to eat from the food truck and when I returned I found my cousin sitting next to our section of the shaft smiling. I asked him what was making him so happy and he told me that he had caught Corky looking at how we were building our section so he could copy our methods. Like my father had predicted, my cousin and I were now better than Corky. At that moment I recalled my father’s prophetic words and I realized that he had given me a secret gift; he had given me intellectual confidence.

The current educational system in place today has a structure and a curriculum that does not cater to the individual. In essence it is an assembly line of learning that moves millions of children and adults along toward defined completion. Although I do not entirely agree with the curriculum choices that seem to be universally accepted (there is far too much emphasis on mathematics in my opinion) I recognize and accept that the system must be built to serve the masses. Unfortunately many individuals do not do well on this educational treadmill and they become discouraged about learning. Those that function poorly in the traditional school setting lose their intellectual confidence and more importantly their intellectual curiosity. They become afraid of what they do not understand and they hide from the idea of learning. This sense of intellectual inferiority that becomes their internal demon is produced by an inability to mentally conform to a cookie-cutter educational system not a lack of intelligence. Unfortunately this misguided self-belief robs some of a higher level of overall personal fulfillment and achievement.

It is important for schools to have structure but it is equally important for those who are responsible for the raising of children to understand that the educational system is not the judge and jury in regard to intelligence. Most people can learn; it is just a matter of how learning is presented. The use of tutors, mentors, coaches, and alternative ways of teaching are not an admission of weakness or ignorance, they are a positive response to the signs that a person needs another way of learning. The most important concept for all of us to realize is that intelligence is relative to a situation and that all of us are capable of learning. Intellectual confidence is created by teaching others until they grasp what is trying to be conveyed. It is not the case that learning must be done in a prescribed way that makes it easy for the educator but rather in multiple ways that finds the avenue of learning for the pupil. The development of intellectual confidence and its offspring of intellectual curiosity creates a mind that is open and unafraid of the unknown, it sponsors wonderment and experimentation, and it maps out a course around pseudo-intellectualism that unfairly blocks those who have yet to discover their own unique path to the answer.

When I was about thirty years old I found myself, through a variety of circumstances, attending law school. At the age of thirty I was much older than most of the other students and therefore much more experienced in life. I was intellectually confident and I was not intimidated, as many of my classmates were of our professors. I firmly believed that I could learn anything my professors knew and that the only thing that intellectually separated us was the exposure to the study of the law. It was in Civil Procedure class that my self-belief would cause a small amount of controversy. The class was in a large theater-like venue where the students were required to sit in specific seats that correlated with a chart at the professor’s desk. During each class the professor would call on students from the chart to answer questions about the previous week’s reading. The student called upon was then required to rise and answer questions as the professor socratically led the class to the meaning of the case at hand. On one particular night my name was called and I was asked to explain “Collateral Estoppel”. I had read the case and studied the concept but it had never been explained to me. My answers to the professor's questions were incorrect but he did not choose to teach me or the rest of my fellow students in the class. Instead, he chose to ridicule me and make them laugh at my mistakes. I allowed him to get his first laugh but when he belittled me for the second time I simply said to him, “I guess if I had been reading this case for the past thirty years, as you have, I would know what it meant also.” My challenge of the professor was accompanied by an audible gasp from my fellow young students. He instantly became angry and told me to sit down. All the fun was over for him because I refused to let him pretend in front of others that he was intellectually superior to me because he knew what “Collateral Estoppel” was and I, a first year law student, did not. I had pulled back the curtain and shown to all that the supposed wizard was in reality, just a little man.

At first glance it could be hard to see a correlation between the two examples, learning how to build elevator shafts and the concepts of civil procedure, but they are exactly the same. They are both things that can be learned by almost anyone who has a good teacher and possesses intellectual confidence; they are both things that can seem impossible to learn if taught by a bad teacher who destroys the intellectual confidence of the student with their own arrogance and by doing so, fosters insecurity and the fear in those trying to learn.