Watching the Rio Olympics these last several weeks has gotten me thinking about expertise. Everyone agrees that it’s good to be great at something — traversing the balance beam, speaking a foreign language fluently, or baking a soufflé. What’s less clear is how we become great at something in the first place and why we’re willing to work so hard to do so.

There are two schools of thought about how we acquire expertise. Researchers and brothers Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus contend that when learning a new skill, we pass through five stages of competence, from novice to expert. The novice learns initially through rigid adherence to rules, but over time acquires sufficient skill and judgement to become an expert who responds intuitively to unanticipated challenges that present themselves. The more accomplished we become, the more rules limit the additional learning required to achieve exceptional performance. Understanding context and responding reflexively become key.

In contrast, Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson dismisses altogether the importance of intuition in becoming an expert. Ericsson, patron saint of piano teachers and personal trainers, insists that the only way to develop expertise is through sustained periods of “deliberate practice” during which one hammers away at improving a desired skill until mastery is achieved. (It is Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice that led Malcolm Gladwell to attribute to Ericsson — incorrectly, it appears — the “10,000 hours” of practice requirement for becoming an expert.) Ericsson considers expertise based on intuition a form of “arrested development” that encourages complacency, discourages continued learning, and as such represents the greatest single obstacle to becoming an expert.

Regardless of which theory of expertise you subscribe to, it’s clear that becoming accomplished at something involves a lot of work. But what’s the point of it all? What’s the value of expertise?

Becoming an expert at something is, not surprisingly, a great way to make money. Economist Robert Frank, in his recent New York Times op-ed “The Incalculable Value of Finding a Job You Love,” describes research that shows that experts in any line of work capture a disproportionate share of the domain’s total income, since demand for highly-developed skills almost always exceeds supply. We appreciate quality work, whether it’s the fit and finish of a master carpenter’s millwork or the inspired performance of concert violinist, and we’re willing to pay top dollar to enjoy it.

Learning some skill or talent also increases our personal sense of agency, our belief that we can control the chaotic forces at play in what appears to be an increasingly unpredictable world. This perception of being in control of events — illusory though it might be — allows us to feel safe as we navigate through the unexpected challenges life tosses our way. This results, I suspect, from the resilience and hard work required to master any craft and the belief that if we can finish a marathon, we can endure any trial we might encounter.

Finally, becoming an expert at something satisfies a primal desire to grow, to progress, to become stronger or smarter than anyone else and, as a result, survive to tell the story. Striving to do something better than others is a powerful human instinct that in its most basic expression propels the evolution of our species — a species that loves nothing more than winning and keeping score. I offer Michael Phelps as a case in point.

Clearly there are significant economic, psychological, and biological benefits associated with learning and developing expertise. But is there ever a time when expertise becomes a disadvantage, when we’re better off not knowing everything we know? I’ll explore this question in my next post.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” William Bruce Cameron

As technology comes to play an increasing role in education and as online courses proliferate, we run the risk of confusing training with education. This distinction becomes even more important as demand grows, from both the public and private sectors, for measuring the value of higher education.

What’s the difference between these two learning activities? Barry Schwartz, psychology professor at Swarthmore College, provides one answer I especially like. As we try to determine whether an activity is training or education, Schwartz suggests we ask ourselves whether the work we are doing addresses any of these four questions:

What is worth knowing?
What is worth doing?
What makes for a good human life?
What are my responsibilities to other people?

If our work asks us to read, write, or think about any of these four questions, we’re engaged in education. Unlike training, the effectiveness of which is easily measured through standardized testing, the most valuable outcomes of education can’t be easily weighed except, perhaps, by the quality of the life one leads. What scale should we use to measure passion, inspiration, intellectual curiosity, and a commitment to the welfare of others? “A whole life well-lived” is how Aristotle described a life infused with these qualities, the kind of life he also described as a life of “virtue” — a declaration that resurrects from the distant past a word that for many of us today has lost both meaning and relevance.

Training is to education as answers are to questions. Training aims to transfer existing knowledge useful in solving known problems, while education aims to stimulate provocative questions designed to discover unknown truths. Training lives in a world of certainty and values stability and consistency of application, whereas education lives in a world of ambiguity and values growth, impermanence, and change. Training seeks to preserve, while education seeks to transform. Both modes of learning are important, but neither should be confused with the other.

Several weeks ago, on a sun-drenched afternoon not far from the shores of Lake Michigan, the dean of Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Adrian Randolph, welcomed graduates, family, and friends to the Convocation ceremony for the Class of 2016. During his remarks Randolph touched on a number of topics, but for me the most thought-provoking point he had to make concerned the relationship between empathy and a liberal arts education.

While acknowledging that students in the College graduate having specialized, or majored, in one or two academic subjects, Randolph suggested that the real value of the education they had received might reside “in the interstices, the spaces in between your courses, and the notional connections you will now continue to forge as you develop.” He told our graduates that he hoped “you will recall the joys and frustrations of having to study things that were way out of your comfort zones” because “this intellectual stretching is at the core of our educational mode in a college of arts and sciences.”

The adaptability that develops from these kinds of intellectual challenges, Randolph observed, is important for one’s personal and professional life, in large part because it cultivates a “deep empathy.” “Through viewing the world through many lenses,” he noted, “one ideally learns how to empathize with others, to grasp the world from many different perspectives.”

This is a message every college senior should hear before leaving campus after graduation.

If I may borrow a concept from our economics department, empathy is a commodity for which demand far exceeds supply. Watching the evening news has become a painful experience as political discourse in the United States and the European democracies becomes increasingly vitriolic, divisive, and vulgar. Empathy, or the capacity to understand and share the feelings of others, no longer appears to be a worthy aspiration for many politicians — or for many of us, either, judging by the boorish behavior demonstrated by some attendees at recent political rallies. The notion that we might make an effort to understand a point-of-view different from our own appears, like the British pound sterling in recent days, to have lost much of its value.

Similar to taking on an academic subject we know little about, living empathetically takes us out of our comfort zones. Empathy does not come naturally to many of us, which is why we need to learn how to do it, much as we need to learn how to write a formal thank-you note or offer a firm handshake. Empathy is above all about establishing and sustaining connection with others; it transports us from a narrow field of awareness constrained by self-reference to a more expansive view of the world, one informed by a commitment to mutual understanding and the exploration of shared values. Most challenging of all, empathy requires us to admit on occasion that we, too, might be part of the problem we are struggling to solve — a reality even the most responsible among us find difficult to acknowledge, especially when we are battling each other in the heat of a high-stakes political campaign.

I suspect there is a relationship between the growing incivility of our political culture and the increasingly frequent (and vocal) challenges to the value of a liberal arts education that surface, now, almost weekly in the media. Politicians who know better — in some cases because they, too, are beneficiaries of the very kind of education they now publicly scorn — argue that a liberal arts education is at best an irrelevant luxury affordable to only a privileged few and at worst an unconscionable waste of taxpayers’ money. And in an era of stagnant economic growth, critics charge that a liberal arts education does little to prepare college graduates for work in the “real world” — by which, I assume, they mean the hard-nosed world of business. This last charge has been thoroughly discredited in recent years by CEOs and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike who identify those with liberal arts degrees as among the most creative, collaborative, and promotable associates in their organizations.

It’s become clear that a liberal arts education has never been more valuable for college graduates who will require agility, adaptability, and resilience as they progress through what some project will be five to ten different careers over the course of their working lives.

But I would go further and argue that such an education has now become indispensable for the very survival of our democratic institutions, which depend for their vitality and relevance largely on the arts of communication, innovation, and cooperation — all hallmarks of an interdisciplinary arts and sciences education that “seeks to view the world through many lenses.” Let’s not forget that the “liberal arts,” as the name implies, denotes a particular kind of curriculum aimed at being of particular benefit to free citizens living in a democratic society.

Just as much of the value of a liberal arts education is to be found in the “interstices” between courses taken and majors earned, it should be self-evident that the real value of political debate lies in finding the truth concealed somewhere between the monocular, polarizing arguments of Republican versus Democrat or “Leave” versus “Remain.” This certainly was the prevailing view in the not too distant past, when a politician’s reputation rested largely on his or her ability to compromise and work productively with others across the aisle, with the aim of reaching mutually agreeable and beneficial solutions.

Today, however, we stare in utter disbelief as politicians scream and hurl obscene insults at each other, while their supporters slug it out in a nightmarish Hobbesian world in which, the Leviathan’s author writes, “the condition of man…is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

Searching for common ground and shared concerns in times of political, economic and social disruption is difficult and often thankless work, but it’s work that more often than not leads to the discovery of new knowledge, new truths, and new solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We can be sure that in a world without empathy, without some fundamental understanding of and concern for how other people think and live, finding such solutions will be next to impossible. If this is the only benefit a liberal arts education has to offer — and of course there are many others as well — such an education will be well worth the investment, for our own sake as well as for the sake of our children.