Bewilderment as a Journey (to Learning)

As a teacher, I often think that confusion is a good thing. It is not the aim of education, of course, but it is a place along the journey which ought not be frightening. If education is, in part, about rendering the complex simpler in order to think about it, it is also about rendering the simple more complex in order to think about it. Like the oft-repreated saying about making hte familiar unfamiliar (and vice versa), these are stages along the sometimes wandering journey of education. 

What made me think about bewilderment as connected to education was a book entitled Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion (University of Virginia, 2007). Authored by Frederick J. Ruf, I admit to having stumbled upon this book only because a co-edited book of mine was also published by the University of Virginia Press. And, it was one of those reads that lingers and tumbles through one's mind for quite some time. In my case, Ruf's ideas lingered not because of the focus on travel but because of the focus on bewilderment. (In fact, I may just read Ruf's other works which include disorder and chaos in their titles!) 

In some ways, the role of bewilderment in higher education is most obvious when one is teaching (and learning). All too often students think this is a sign of failure -- to be confused, bewildered, lost. All too often I felt that same worry. And yet, this may also mean we are struggling with important matters in significant ways. To believe one must find ideas easy, that struggling means one is not smart, or that confusion is an insoluble end rather than an opening for exploration, are feelings that appear in office hours and probably as temptations for all of us. And yet, our route to inspiration, to comprehension, to learning, may be enabled by this very sense of bewilderment. 

Are you bewildered? Confused? Is it helping you learn? 

 

Comments

[Robert O. Keohane]

This blog about bewilderment resonates with me. I am a scholar of international relations who has tried to understand puzzles such as why, in a world of states that is often seen as "anarchic," some degree of international government exists, in the form of international organizations, not just the UN (of varying effectiveness) but the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, all of which have important impacts on the world political economy. I have found that my most important contributions to helping to solve this puzzle (e.g. in AFTER HEGEMONY: COOPERATION AND DISCORD IN THE WORLD POLITICAL ECONOMY, Princeton University Press, 1984) have come when I have been utterly confused. For two years before figuring out what to say in this book I was reluctant to go to academic cocktail parties since I would be asked what I was working on and could not articulate my argument. Conversely, when I am not really confused I am typically not working on such a basic and important problem as the one of how to explain institutionalized cooperation in world politics -- I am working on more minor problems. So I concluded that for me at least, being bewildered is a necesary condition for my best discoveries. I think that Shimer prepared me for this experience since reading Plato or Hobbes (both of whom I hated when I read them)bewildered me. Why are these works considered "great?" By whom and why? Reading textbooks will not bewilder you (except if you wonder why you should spend your life this way!), and therefore will not prepare you for the importance of bewilderment in the process of intellectual discovery.

-- Robert O. Keohane, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University (Shimer B.A. 1961).