The expertise conundrum- Relook at Mastery

Ask any renowned clinician the secret of this diagnostic acumen and the chances are that he will given a self-effacing shrug of his shoulders and ascribe his expertise to experience. Can experience be taught? For those naysayers, the refutation is that if Henri Charriere , author of Papillon can make the experience of his adventures and sufferings come alive for the reader, then perhaps there is a way that the components of expertise or the substance it is constituted of, can be transmitted, taught, brought on par with the learner. If by definition an expert has handled many variable situations successfully on many occasions, logically if these same situations are simulated subjectively or objectively in their diversity and situational uncertainties, expertise could be taught. The moot question- Can mental conflict be simulated particularly in a human interpersonal context? Experts probably are better at handling situations with mental conflict and requiring tough decisions better than the ones who don’t call themselves experts.

The other explanation of expertise could be that it is waiting within the learner, as it were, to be discovered..to be revealed when father time is opportune.  So in concrete terms, skills could be taught and learned. But expertise’s cornerstone is mastery, the unknown variable which transcends pure technical skills and borders on the surreal, much like a Neymar or Messi whose guileless fluidity on the footfall field defy normal teacher-learner paradigms. The sculpture hiding inside the rock, metaphorically speaking, waiting to burst out into the sculptor’s world will at once spur adulation for our new Michaelangelos. But more importantly, it should engage us in the primal question- how does one facilitate the talent, the gift, the expertise to recognize the sculpture or the learning at its most subliminal, minimalistic, almost invisible level almost as it arises in perception for the sculptor or the learner? Can this; this bewitching flirtation on the interface of science and art, man and god; what we call mastery be indeed taught?

For this, we need to overcome the invisible fetters of language itself. Indeed the english word construct ‘teaching’ leaves much to be desired in its ability to convey its core. All that we have been discussing so far in this blog can be done scant justice by what we normally understand by teaching. German seems to have a wide repertoire of words to encapsulate the different strands of what ‘teaching’ in its widest sense could connote. Bringing along (beibringen), lecturing (unterrichten), transmitting (vermitteln) , teaching (lehren) are at least 4 different emanations of the spectrum continuum of teaching & learning in the german language. Teaching expertise could be better understood as bringing along (beibringen) someone who is suitable to be an expert.

How does one become suitable to be an expert? How mastery is born and is sustained may have everything to do with the mind of the expert. Mastery’s subjective existence is from its ontological declarative reality. Being Master may precede Mastery or phenomenologically speaking, they would arise together. It’s objective existence could be like the postulated Schroedinger’s cat of quantum mechanics embodying the different demonstrable attributes of being absolute Master to absoute novice in a probabilistic (sine wave if you must)  continuum. One does not really know the reality of mastery in the context of studying it objectively. That is, until we open the box and collapse 'reality'   Mastery is dead. Long live the Master.  Mastery is alive. All hail the master.