It hit me about five years ago while teaching a class of young adults. Many were graduate students who were brilliant … and they knew it. Thanks to smart phones, they could fact-check me on the spot! Was my quote accurate and in context? They could find out in seconds. They were quick to “well, actually…” me. Have you ever met someone like that? We are raising an army of them, so if you haven’t yet, you will.
While I believe strongly in the value of education, something is missing. In a sea of prolific, young, know-it-all Googlers taking the world by storm, something is truly missing.
While I was teaching a class with the aforementioned young adults, it hit me how lost they were. Not lost like I don’t know WHAT the answer is or WHERE I am; lost like I don’t know WHO I am. That’s when I realized my technical school-educated, South Dakota-born, Harley-riding Grandpa had something these young adults are sailing further and further away from. Grandpa spent a lifetime honing who he was, yet we obsess over what we know. It appears a little knowledge used wisely is BETTER than a lot of knowledge that just puffs up. A marksman with a bow is BETTER than a toddler with a machine gun.
Let me clarify. Plato and Jesus called it dikaiosune (Greek), though I think it was poorly translated “justice” in the Republic. Aristotle called it areté. Homer used this term to describe the nobility of his heroes in “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” Dallas Willard defines it like this: “What that is about a person that makes him right or good.”
Here is what bothers me. We are raising a generation of people who have access to a lot of information, but we are neglecting to teach them what it means to be “good.” In fact, we avoid it because we don’t know what “good living” is anymore! Even our education system has pulled away from requiring students to actually “get” what they are learning.
Think about it. We live in a world where someone can get a master’s degree in business administration and not actually have the capacity to lead at all, or be an unstable person who becomes a psychologist, or even a crooked lawyer. How does this happen, you may ask?
Because we are teaching our kids that all they have to do is remember facts for a test, and we neglect to develop WHO they are.
So here is the dirty little secret that is killing us: A person can be factually correct, yet be a complete mess of a human, a “know-it-all” who has no wisdom, a toddler with a machine gun of facts (often unverified) doing more harm and creating infinite confusion.
Here is my prediction: if we don’t bring this “noble character” back, it doesn’t matter how much more information we discover or share … we are done.
If you are looking for more on this, visit www.luke117.com.