Love the Lord w/ Lincoln Brewster

Learning from others

What if someone were to believe everything presented to him? He would end up pretty confused. What if a man was building his house and took advice from everyone passing by. One person said to build a country-like wrap around porch. The builder built this. Another said the exterior walls should be contemporary. Make them out of a mixture of mettle, concrete and bricks. The builder built the walls in a contemporary style. Still another passer by told the builder that the interior should be styled like a Native American hut. Again, the builder built the interior to look like a Native American hut. Needless to say the builder’s house would look very odd. Probably no one would like it. You see the builder didn’t decipherer advice. He just took in everything that came along.

Up to this point I have mainly discussed this topic from the aspect of someone giving advice. However we must also look at this topic from the prospective of one who is receiving this advice. A student may be presented with all the right information that a parent, teacher, or book can give him, and yet if he lives life with a mindset of not believing anything, what good are all those resources to him? To refuse someone else’s advice is prideful. Take the classic example of the man refusing to stop for directions. What is he doing? He is refusing to take the advice of someone else. Why? He is being prideful. What will it cost him? Lost time. As teenagers our pride is put into overdrive. If we’re presented with a difficult math assignment, are we willing to go to a friend who is knowledgeable in math, or are we afraid to ask for help? What will we lose end up asking for help? We may end up being slightly embarrassed, but probably not as embarrassed as we would be if we got an f on the math test.

A good balance is where the parent or teacher realizes that sometimes, a person must learn things for himself. In addition, the other end of that is when the student realizes that sometimes he must let go of his pride, decipherer the information given to him, and realize that he cannot always discover everything for himself.

Learning from others part two

Every parent knows that children need to learn some things for themselves. A parent would be foolish to pick a baby up every time it falls. If the parent did this, the poor child would never learn to walk. The parent must let the child learn for himself. All the lectures in the world about the importance of money will do nothing for a child unless he is forced to make his own money.

Unfortunately some parents don’t realize that life is also to be learned. Everyone needs advise. Why should we travel a road someone else has traveled? Now if this is an exiting road, say learning to walk, there might be a difference, but letting teen try harmful drugs when the parent knows people who have gone down that road and discovered it to be harmful and dangerous, would be foolish. Abstinence from drugs is either avoiding harm or the avoidance of unnecessary time spent “experimenting” with that dark and slippery road called drugs. Learning to walk is a good thing. The baby will have to do this anyways. There is a difference in-between letting someone try something harmful and letting someone learn a necessary part of life that will end up being for their own good. Might the baby get slightly hurt when he falls? Possibly, but not nearly as much as he would if he tried going through life without knowing how to walk. The same is not true for trying drugs. The harm is not worth the outcome because no outcome from that scenario is good.

There must be a balance in-between letting a child learn life and letting him live life. To say that someone should learn everything by learning from others would be foolish. In many instances the person would never end up learning anything. But to say, question authority, would be foolish, too. Yes we should question the information given to us, but we shouldn’t try to always come up with that information on our own. However we should be open to other’s ideas, not in a believe anything that comes along sort of way, but in a discerning of the advice given us. We must always find a medium. Neither extreme is good.

The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture

Maze Master II