What Can You Do with What You Know?

You've heard the adage, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."  I recently found an educational quote that is similar:

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."

John W. Gardner

I can think of at least a couple of interpretations/discussions to have over the above quote, but today I am focusing on recent goings on that have caused me to ponder, yet again, on learning that is most valuable.

We live in a world where an overload of information is available at a moment's notice.  Yet how trivial and meaningless is much of that information?  Pretty darn.  While I'm not advocating a return to the dark ages, I do want to pose the question, "What can you do with what you know?" Will it change you?  Will it build you?  Can you do something positive with it?

My birthday was a few weeks ago and I wanted to get out in the great outdoors for it. The kids had "fishing" listed on their summer bucket lists, so we loaded up some poles and tackle, picked up some Jamba Juice, and headed into the canyon. 

Now I like the activity of fishing, and I like being places where there are fish, but I don't particularly care for dealing with poles and bait and all that myself. But if we waited around for my husband to go fishing with us, the kids wouldn't get to fish much because he just doesn't have the time (or, let's be honest, the interest). But I have boys who KNOW how to fish! They know how to rig a pole and switch hooks or add a bobber. Thanks to Scouts and grandparents and their father and a friend, they have learned all sorts of things about flies and lures and salmon eggs and Power Bait and the set up and technique for each. There have been so many days where I just stand back and marvel at all they know about fishing and it is so pleasing to me that they have that knowledge and skill. It has value.

Because of their know-how, I was free to just keep an eye on them from the opposite shore as I took wildflower photos.

After our excursion, it was time for... a baseball game. This particular day had only one boy playing and everyone else said they wanted to stay home. When I returned, I found my house cleaned, dinner made, a cake baked, a festive table laid, and hand-written birthday letters waiting for me! There was a lot of valuable knowledge displayed there, for if you can't feed yourself and express yourself, and use what you know to bless others, what's the point?

A case in point is this:  A week later it was my husband's birthday and I later saw a card my daughter made for him. I was so sad when I read what she wrote:  "I love you so so so so so much.  I want to bake a cake for you but I don't know how."  Being the youngest, she hasn't been turned loose in the kitchen yet to cook on her own and even though she's helped a lot, she wasn't confident enough in her skills to just go bake a cake. (Later, for Father's Day, a brother did supervise her making brownies.)  My point is that she had a desire to do something but she didn't have the knowledge she needed to do it and it held her back.

Changing gears to some observations of this week, I have to say that my now "adult" son floored me. He was preparing for a Scout high adventure, and whereas in the past he would have asked a lot of questions and needed a lot of help gathering and packing, this time around he had it so figured out he even took the initiative to repair some items on his own that I would have actually tossed. He decided to take a hammock for sleeping in, but when he pulled out the gear, he found the mosquito net torn. I wasn't really paying attention to all his movements, but at one point I stopped to look and found him SEWING the net back together! Then, the night before departure he found his old water shoes, only to see that the toe was separating from the sole. With no time or money to get a new pair, he decided to try to stitch it back together.  Again, I was doing my own thing at this time until I heard him shout triumphantly, "There is NOTHING a needle and thread can't fix!" I went to see what he'd done and I was so surprised. My son... a cobbler. HA! I have always thought everyone should know how to use a needle and thread and so I've had my kids do little (seemingly trivial) projects over the years; what a lesson in the value of this skill that he turned to it in a time of need to accomplish something necessary!

A day later was this scene:

You know what?  I LOVE seeing my boys with a screwdriver! It might sound odd, but seeing a young man with a tool and the know-how to use it actually thrills me. This boy's chain had come off and he was using the knowledge he had to diagnose the problem and to get to the parts that needed fixing.

He ended up having to call a big brother in (out), not because he didn't know what he was doing but because he needed a little more muscle.

Interestingly, this happened the day after I hired an entrepreneur-minded neighbor kid to fix everyone's tires. He had come around with fliers for his bike fixing business in the spring and I figured we were so busy it was money well spent to have him just come take care of all the flats. My kids watched him and asked him questions and, according to them, they learned that he learned everything about bikes when he asked his dad for one and his dad took him to a thrift store, bought him four bikes in various stages of disrepair, and told him to put together a working bike using what parts were there, and what he could learn from the four different bicycles.  Genius, if you ask me. Hopefully my children learned more about bicycles and tires, etc. from him as they watched him repair their bikes, but I know that I was reminded about the value of knowing how to fix things and having a marketable skill.

It's things like learning knots in Boy Scouts; some may laugh, but there have been many, many times that I needed something rigged and one of my boys was able to lash together something perfect using just the right knots. It's me having too big a to-do list before an out-of-town baseball tournament and being on the road and realizing I didn't get the other half of the garden planted and being able to call home to my 13- and 11-year-olds with the confidence that because of years of planting gardens together I could ask them to finish it and it would turn out great.

Knowledge is power, but different kinds and topics of knowledge have varying degrees of importance and value.  What can you do with what you know?