The Ladder

Every subject has a ladder, which, by climbing, learners gain expertise. They start out as amateurs. If they reach the top, they’ve become experts.

Every subject has a ladder, which, by climbing, learners gain expertise. They start out as amateurs. If they reach the top, they’ve become experts.

Schools and universities, however, often complicate the ladder. Its simplicity is hidden.

By describing it here in outline, we seek to reduce the confusion around it, and take steps to ameliorate the dysfunction that exists between those who look upon a subject from the outside, and those who are most advanced in it. We seek an accord between amateurs and experts.

The First Rung

At the bottom of the ladder, the studious learn through direct encounters with the source material. How this looks differs by subject. In literature and philosophy, they might focus on great books with little time given to commentary or criticism. In history they study grand narratives or biographies or works of journalism and other accounts written close to the time of the event. In science perhaps learners read books written by science journalists or works, like A Brief History of Time, written explicitly for the non-scientist. Learners might also watch movies or videos about these subjects, or listen to podcasts.

Learners focus here less on deep understanding than on immersion in the subject. They may even believe, as students who study abroad seek to learn language through immersion, that they have found a path superior to the ones offered in schools.

There are amateurs in many subjects, including pop culture, where the ladder never rises far above the first rung. Amateurs at this level, however, can acquire impressive, encyclopedic knowledge, and are often more admired by those outside the subject than the experts themselves.

The Second Rung

Learners who advance further must next begin to place distance between themselves and the thing studied. They begin to read, to interpret, but most importantly, they begin to acquire an understanding of the history of the subject itself. Who were its major figures? And what have they contributed to the understanding of the source material? Learners now get a better, a deeper understanding of the major approaches to the subject and who was responsible for them.

In schools, this type of learning is usually associated with introductory, 100-level courses, but learners never fully grasp its core ideas until they begin to work through at the third rung. That said, it’s worthy of study, and when pursued on its own, may possibly be the most edifying part of the climb upwards.

The Third Rung

Learners, now usually under the tutelage of some kind of professional academic, have started down the path of specialization. In upper-level classes, they explore topics specifically chosen for them by their professors. They write on these topics, think on these topics. To those lower down on the ladder, they may seem to have become more narrow-minded than when they started. In fact, this kind of research requires learners to bring to bear disparate trains of thought, sometimes pulling in ideas from other subjects, and pour into this specialization all the vastnesses of things they’ve studied.

At this stage, the primary audience for learners’ work is their teacher or professor. However, due to the most fundamental arrangement of academia, their professors give their work full attention, as well as providing detailed explanations for his or her opinions of it.

The Fourth Rung

At this stage learners themselves have become experts. Their writing has even found an audience. Perhaps some of them have even become tenured professors. At the very least, they have found some interested readers who share the articles they publish to their websites.

The primary difference between the third and fourth rungs is the degree to which learners must research independently. Though they may gain prestige or open doors from the institutions or organizations they’re associated with, or otherwise, they are responsible, not just for the judgment of their audiences, but for finding the audience themselves.

After the Fourth Rung

At some stage, we might expect experts to settle back into the original interests of the first rung. There, they can become again like amateurs, fascinated by the surface of the subject, as by this means they can most effectively and efficiently connect with all its depths.

This kind of expert is rare, however. In most cases, when experts tire of the strenuous work associated with the higher rungs, they will settle somewhere on the second rung, taking an interest in unusual editions of scholarly works and perhaps attending to a library.

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