====== The Amateur Scholar ====== from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com October, 2010 Some years ago when I still had the bookstore (in December, 2005 to be exact), OSCAR published a piece of mine called The Knowledge Explosion, arguing the need for amateur scholarship and a well-informed lay public. I had occasion to re-read that piece over the summer, and would like to expand on it here – to take its thought in a different direction. What occurred to me as I re-read the column was that our universities, extraordinarily good at producing specialized knowledge of every kind, are rather poor at creating or encouraging the sort of educated lay public that a democratic society requires. For this they are not entirely to blame: First, to the extent that they rely for funding on government and corporate contracts, they can scarcely avoid hiring and producing the kind of specialists who produce and package the kind of knowledge that these institutions are willing to pay for. And second, to the extent that young people and their parents see the university degree primarily as a vehicle for job prospects and upward mobility, they can scarcely avoid turning out 'alumni' who have been trained for competence in various fields rather than truly illuminated or even educated. Still, the fact remains: We really do need a lay public that is familiar and comfortable with "the state of the art" not just in high-tech gadgetry, but in human thought. To this end, it needs universities with programs in history, philosophy, literature and all the humanities designed really to educate their students, at least as much as to to turn out highly specialized papers for learned journals. My father, who, for better and worse, was mostly self-educated, liked to quote Russian proverbs; and one of his best, one that stuck with me, was that "A trained horse is still a horse." From his perspective, our North American schools and universities were producing well-trained horses, if that, but conspicuously failing to produce educated men and women. To repeat, this is not entirely the universities' fault. Training at the expense of real education may be the best that any school system can do. Teachers (and I have been one) always teach from their employer's and their own agendas, and have to teach some trainable skills before they can teach anything else. In the final reckoning, anyone who wants a real education has to steal it for himself – as Prometheus was said to have stolen fire from the gods. Still, if the schools really tried to educate their customers and students about the scope, nature and limits of knowledge itself, the results might be very different. As it is, much lip service is given to the ideal of education without paying or grading for it, or putting much effort into teaching for it. The premium is on research – more exactly, on cited publications. Before it is a teaching institution, the modern university is a factory for the production of knowledge (admittedly, quite an efficient factory), and a bureaucracy for the classification, production, storage and distribution of knowledge. Accordingly, the world of the professional academic is necessarily a bureaucratic one, even apart from the obvious facts that scholars make work for each other by editing and commenting on each other's papers, and that the university itself is a large corporation tasked with the administration of substantial assets and thousands of people. These are its strengths; and the amateur scholar, lacking access to them, is at a real disadvantage. To compensate, however, he escapes the narrow specialization of modern academia with its turf wars over jurisdictions, its climate of risk avoidance and its cover-your-ass mentality. The professional scholar is, and has to be, protective of his reputation. It's what he sells to potential employers and customers, and is the only asset he has. The amateur makes his living in some other way, and lacks access to the knowledge market, and to most of the apparatus of scholarship; but to compensate he has his freedom. Having no reputation to lose, he need please only himself. He can enjoy the pleasures of puzzle-solving and craftsmanship, researching and writing about whatever has caught his interest, in his own good time and unconcerned with tenure. This makes a great hobby in his working years, and makes retirement something to look forward to. Just because they are fruits of pleasure and leisure, the lucubrations of the amateur have something to offer society as a whole, and even to the professional sometimes – first, because they contribute to the formation of the 'educated lay public' that I am calling for. Indeed, the amateur makes such a contribution by his very existence, and through his circle of friends. Amateur writings also supply much needed popularizations of the current findings and thinking, and sometimes have a useful shaping influence on the attentions of professionals – keeping really interesting, but currently impossible questions before the professional's eye. . All performers draw stimulation and direction from the responses of their audience; and professional academics are performers – in the classroom, at conferences and in their competition for grants. A well-informed, lively, audience improves the quality of any performance, and can influence the evolution of the show. Admittedly, the amateur can accomplish much more in some fields than others. We will not see amateurs doing experiments in high-energy particle physics, for example, though great theoretical work has been, and still can be done with just a pencil and paper. Einstein himself dropped out of school (aged 16) in 1895 and did not get a proper teaching job until 1908, and thus did his first work as an amateur, earning his living in the Swiss patent office. By contrast, fields like philosophy, history, and anthropology were dominated by amateurs from their beginnings, and still have areas where freedom and intellectual honesty count for more than the scholarly assets and discipline of the professional. How does one become an amateur scholar? Find a question that really interests you, then read your way into it and live with it, until you discover that you have something to write that someone else (or only you!) might find worth reading. The greatest difficulty is with the first step: to admit to yourself that you are ignorant of something that you believe would be worth knowing. Very few people seem able to do this. Almost everyone papers over the hard questions, rather than feel their bite – rather than let themselves be driven by authentic ignorance and curiosity. Why does a dropped coffee mug fall to the ground? Because of 'gravity' of course. Everyone knows that! But no one knows exactly what 'gravity' is, and if you can improve on our best available explanations of it you will deserve the Nobel, no matter what you do for a living. The body of professionally gathered and peer-reviewed knowledge that one can find in libraries and on the Internet is a glory of our age, but you might be amazed how many questions are still lying around, waiting for someone to ask them.