A need for all trades

Our senior students are getting closer to graduation, and we hear them talk about their anxieties and hopes. They are excited to leave the classroom but are scared of the real world. Some of them echo what other students say: I don’t think my classes prepared me for the workplace. I’m a jack of all trades, master of none.

The label has long been used derisively to talk about people who know too little of too many things and has been used to warn students not to venture too far from their lessons. It’s connected to how people often react to student protests, including those we had in our last national elections, and now those across college campuses in the United States, where students are protesting the culture of death imposed by wealthy nations and their funds upon Palestine.

“Go back to your classrooms,” the crowds say.

Why is there such a need for specialization, and why is such specialization expected from the education sector alone? Perhaps it would pay to look more closely at the original phrase, because, like many adages, the original is often modified to suit the interests of the time rather than the intent of the author.

The first mention of “Jack of All Trades” emerged in the 1600s as a compliment for people with multiple talents. This was during the time of the Renaissance, when the Renaissance Man was one who knew a wide variety of things and was conversant in a broad range of topics.

Three hundred years later, as the Industrial Revolution began, someone added “master of none.”

This is understandable: the Industrial Revolution also required people to specialize in a single step in long processes of production. There were button pushers, lever pullers, people who put screws in, people who took bad products out.

To do more than what one was assigned to do was also to “waste” company time, so the saying became a way to keep people in line, a trap to keep them in boxes. Over time, people wouldn’t question why there was such a box in the first place.

Can such a person function in today’s world?

Before we critique the concept of specialization, we have to be more critical of the idea of “mastery.”

Some people would jump to the notion that mastery means getting high grades. A grade, however, is simply a representation of how well a student mastered a skill built for demonstration in a classroom. There is no guarantee that the student will remember what they learned, let alone apply it to the real world—and this is true for all schools.

Mastery is built over one’s lifetime and it can span a range of tasks. It can be as simple as remembering historical events, or as complex as relating those events to current issues. It can be as simple as being able to say which theologian espoused what belief, or as complex as using logic to build arguments. It can be as simple as doing basic mathematics, or as complex as reading large data sets and gleaning meaningful information from them.

Mastery, moreover, does not mean being mediocre in all fields if only to boast that one has tried to master something. It can mean that one specializes in a field, but also has the basic skills to be conversant in a variety of fields so that one can talk to a variety of people, bring the right experts together in one group, and even recognize when one is being taken advantage of by experts who have all the knowledge but none of the integrity.

Specialization, therefore, means knowing a field with enough depth to understand how it is connected to other fields. It means being able to talk sensibly to experts in other fields so that one can ask the right questions. Specialization does not mean leaving everything to the experts, and turning oneself into a passive observer.

Specialization and mastery mean loving learning for a lifetime, and appreciating how many fields, though difficult, carry within them tools to survive in a changing world.

Philosophy and theology, for logic. Mathematics, to recognize patterns. Languages, to understand cultures. Writing, to assemble arguments. Public speaking, to hone the ability to think on one’s toes. The social sciences, to examine the social world systematically. The bench sciences, to examine the living world systematically. The humanities, to understand the human experience.

And protest rallies? To see how one’s lessons can be used to fix a broken world.

The protesting students in the US are still attending classes and submitting requirements. They’re doing multiple things without sacrificing the integrity of any one task. They are not unlike many of us who hold several jobs to survive, who juggle school and work to keep ourselves afloat, who take on various tasks every day and do them all well.

We are, all of us, jacks of all trades.

Some writers say that the proverb has long been modified:Jack of all trades, master of none

Is oftentimes better than being master of oneWith many new fields, emerging pandemics, global crises, and complex issues? That’s a modification that makes sense.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu