As is my wont, I just happened to read two things that I think are talking about the same thing and it’s a thing that I think is kind of important, so I’m going to talk about that thing a little bit more.  I’m re-reading A Pedagogy for Liberation right now (highly recommended, BTW) and I will probably end up having a lot of things to say about it.  But today, just the one thing.

Yesterday, I came across Martin Schwartz’s short essay in the Journal of Cell Science (thanks FemaleScienceProfessor!)  The essay’s called The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research — and if we push it just a little further, I think what Schwartz is saying is pretty much in line with what Freire and Shor advocate.  And pushed a little bit further, Schwartz does a good job articulating some things we need to keep in mind as librarians and some reasons why what we do is important.

Basically, I want to talk about this one piece of PoL here - Friere’s concept of the gnosiological cycle — or a cycle of knowing.  Basically, Freire argues that there are two, just two “distinct moments in the way we learn.”   These moments are distinct, but dialectically related — one is the moment where new knowledge is produced.  The other is the moment where new knowledge is known, or perceived.

One of the real problems with traditional classroom education is that these two moments are not treated as distinct but dialectially related, but as entirely separate. The moment of producing knowledge happens way far away from where students are expected to learn/know/perceive that knowledge.  This cheapens the cycle - it becomes not a cycle of knowing or learning, but instead of cycle of transference.

So what does this have to do with feeling stupid?  A whole lot.  Schwartz argues - kind of passionately, elegantly and wonderfully - that feeling stupid is a necessary part of producing knowledge.  Ph.D candidates come in unprepared for that.  Their coursework doesn’t prepare them to be knowledge producers; it doesn’t teach them that research is hard - it inherently means going in and dealing with stuff that you don’t know yet.

In fact, he argues that coursework does the opposite.  It makes people who are good at science feel smart, not stupid.  They get the answers right, they get good grades on tests.  They read about other people’s discoveries and they understand them.  Then they get to grad school and BANG - they are expected to be the ones making the discoveries and they are entirely unprepared for that.

“I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area.  I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Tabue knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate).  If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did.  That’s why it was a research problem.  And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve….

….The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.  That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating.”

See, the kind of smart supported in courses and classes isn’t the cool kind of smart, and we can’t get to the cool kind of smart without feeling stupid.  He calls this “productive stupidity.”  He even uses the “liberation” word to describe it, right?  But for us, I don’t think this essay goes quite far enough.

Where I think he doesn’t go far enough is - why wait until the Ph.D level to start thinking this way?  Why talk about managing the transition from all of the other education to doctoral education — why not start re-thinking all of the other education?  Or in PoL terms - why keep those two moments in the way we learn separate until grade seventeen?  And, most importantly, why leave almost everyone there is out — out of this knowledge-producing moment?

And this is why this matters for libraries.  Because that’s what we do.  That’s what we’re for. To let anyone who wants to engage in both moments - knowledge producing and knowledge knowing.  We do it because knowing that you can make your own knowledge is liberating, and it is important.  And I think we’re some of the best advocates there are for pushing education where it needs to go to make this happen for more than the future professors.

When I was doing my first degree, one of my mentors used to tell this story about old-school history education.  There was a famous professor in his department who would teach the best of the best students and who was well known for almost never giving out A’s.  Once there was an undergraduate student who wrote a paper about which this professor waxed almost poetic.  Nothing was wrong with it - it was wonderful.  When asked why the A- instead of the A, the professor looked over the top of his glasses in utter bewilderment.   “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t publishable.”

We heard this story mostly as a “you don’t know how good you have it getting your A’s for your non-publishable papers,”  But truthfully, even a lot of scholars who would laugh and shake their heads weren’t too far different themselves in that they didn’t think of their students as producing knowledge.  I’ve been in a lot of conversations over the years with scholars who actively resisted calling what undergraduates do “scholarship” because it isn’t original, it doesn’t contribute to the disciplinary bodies of knowledge we’re all building.  I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.  I think that we need to recognize that even though undergraduates are rarely going to be ready enough, or lucky enough, to engage in research that truly represents something new - it’s new to them.  Even if they’re not fully-fledged scholars, they need to learn how to create new knowledge for themselves.

And it’s not like that’s an easy process.  We do have to learn how to do it.  We need guidance and support as we do it, and we need to do it early and often.  That’s the other reason I think these ideas are important for librarians.  We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the mechanical processes of research easier for our students, our users, our citizens - and we should do that.  But we need to remember that there’s more to research than the processes of finding a book on the shelf, or the full-text of an article.  Research is hard.  It makes you feel stupid.  It makes you uncertain and it makes you anxious.  Nothing we can do to our systems, our services, or our collections will change that.

For all that, though, we all need to know how to do it.  Whether we’re in school or not.  Libraries - public, school, academic, whatever - are places where we should be able to do it, and places that celebrate the knowing we produce.