A Reasonable Thing to Ask?

In another life, I used to teach junior doctors. Not so much in lecture format — lectures are a pretty useless way of getting ideas and information across — but in small, interactive groups, often informally. I soon learned that they were very clued up about the detail of most things, and could recite it almost parrot fashion. Actually, they generally knew far more about these topics than I did. I thought that while some of their knowledge was useful, a lot of it wasn’t all that relevant, even if it was interesting. I also learned, and not just from them, that it’s often far harder to answer apparently simple questions — the sort that a child asks. And I learned that we actually know a lot more than we think, we just don’t realise that we know. Things that we learned in school, for example, often seem to be lost, forgotten. It’s a strange irony, but schooling often seems to destroy our ability to question as a child does. We don’t realise it at the time, but we are being moulded into the form that society deems to be appropriate and reasonable. And there is now the suspicion that the use of computers alters how we think.

Retrieving this forgotten knowledge doesn’t always come automatically. There are tricks — sorry, techniques — that are helpful, the sort of things that you might learn on a management course. SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and Kipling’s list (who, what, where, when why, how) are simple ones, and there are many hundreds more. And you can learn to think ‘out of the box’ and about ‘lateral thinking’.

Or you can just leave it to Google; someone else is bound to have an answer to your problem, if you can only formulate the question correctly. It’s fair enough to know where to find the information and the answers, rather than trying to remember everything; yet your own understanding won’t be improved by this second hand knowledge. For this you really need to question yourself. If you think you are rational, logical and empirical, then you’ll expect an explanation for (almost) everything. The answers won’t always be rational and logical, though.

Think of map reading and satellite navigation. The sat nav does all the work for you, so why bother to learn how to read maps? Well, you’ve only got to read a few horror stories of where the sat navs have taken people who blindly relied on them to realise that they are not infallible — and if the systems are turned off, you’re lost.

But you are happy to be reasonable, aren’t you? Here’s a quotation from George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.