Listen to “Mother Wit”

“As I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.” – Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

We pride ourselves on our reading of books, some famous and some even considered “classics” or “must-reads”. We also pride ourselves on which schools we attended and what accolades we collected. And we should be proud, reading and translating learned knowledge into practical wisdom is commendable. The same applies to reaping the rewards of your efforts. However, we must not confuse access to education with the ability to reason. We all have at one point been too eager to condemn our opponents (political, academic, etc.) as ignorant. We believe that they just won’t get it, that they are incapable of understanding. Our accusations may be true, maybe not, but what’s certain is that listening dies once we label our opponents as ignorant. We cannot learn that which we think we already know. As Maya Angelou explicates in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, intelligence, like beauty, expresses itself in many ways. Angelou now passes on this “lesson in living” to us, that if we “listen carefully”, even to those we find provincial, we may receive “the collective wisdom of generations”.

We often hear that a reader lives a thousand lives before she dies. Angelou reminds us that the same can be said of listeners.