Theme
Hopefully, we all learn something every day. On this particular day, however, we’ll be learning about learning itself. Taking information on board, processing it, and then implementing it in surprising and creative ways is fundamental to good leadership. It is easy to think that leaders have done their learning and are now passing on their expertise: of course this is true in part, but a good teacher knows, too, that students are wonderful sources of new information, new ideas, and new ways of seeing the world. Learning is, in essence, reciprocal. And it’s certainly a hot topic at the moment, whether you’re at the helm of the efforts to better educate AI, or running one of the many companies that use free anguage-learning courses to help enrich their employees: there’s always more to learn and, perhaps more importantly, more ways that learning can be done.
Who?
So, to help demonstrate the benefits of learning, I’ve chosen some words by Alexander Pope (1688 –1744), who knew a lot—and wasn’t afraid to show it! He placed a profound emphasis on the virtue of learning and used his poetry – satirical as it was – to provide the public with a range of lessons: on the nature of Man, on the value of criticism, on social power-dynamics. Now, Pope is remembered as one of our most knowledgeable and witty poets, full of lessons for the assiduous reader.
from Essay on Criticism
But where's the man, who counsel can bestow,
Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiass'd, or by favour, or by spite;
Not dully prepossess'd, nor blindly right;
Tho' learn'd, well-bred; and tho'well-bred, sincere,
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?
Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfin'd;
A knowledge both of books and human kind:
Gen'rous converse; a soul exempt from pride;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?
What?
The extract above is from Essay on Criticism, a long poem that thinks about the relationship between art and its critical judgement. Indeed, it’s an extended piece of thinking about how these arts – writing and criticism – can learn from each other. It contains loads of lines you may have heard before, and which would have served our theme: ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’ can be found at line 523, and ‘A little learning is a dang'rous thing’ is at 213. Each of these is good advice and teaches us much about the art of learning; but, I’ve decided to go with Pope’s more extensive portrait – sketched out negatively by his exasperated questioning – of what a good learner looks like (partly because short form aphorisms aren’t always trustworthy). Pope describes various good qualities a learner might have, but notice how they are all delicately weighted against each other: there are many ‘ands’, ‘yets’, and ‘ors’, suggesting that good learning is a process of constant reorientation and balance.
For me, ‘Who to a friend his faults can freely show, / And gladly praise the merit of a foe’ is the most pertinent chacteristic, because it suggests that true learning is a combination of vulnerability and sympathy: to learn, we must admit that we don’t know something, which isn’t always easy.
But the poem doesn’t only describe what good learning looks like, even its form is teaching us a lesson: Pope is famous for his use of the heroic couplet—two rhyming pairs put in lines of iambic pentameter (read more about that here). Chaucer pioneered this form, but Pope really brought it into the public consciousness, seeing it as a way to make a compelling argument full of memorable lessons. Indeed, the heroic couplet is often thought of as a mnemonic device: a means of making something easier to remember. Compare Pope’s lines to, say, a W.S. Graham poem, which doesn’t rhyme, and you’ll find Pope’s much easier to recall after a few reads. That is, when teaching or learning, the form the lesson takes is as important as the content.
The Broader Context
Pope was a poet of The Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that took place through the 17th and 18th centuries and placed a great value on rational and/or empirical knowledge, and saw itself as socially forward-thinking. There was a purposeful interconnectedness at work, and literature was able to draw from science, philosophy, and many other disciplines. Pope’s writing, therefore, doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is part of a diverse system of learning and teaching, always open to new ideas—sometimes from unexpected places.
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