In the frontispiece to my new book SLAYING GOLIATH, I quoted four statements that represented different aspects of my book.
One of them is a quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that is not well-known.
It comes from a speech called “The Drum Major Instinct,” which he delivered in the last spring of his life at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968.
Dr. King said:
“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
I have no doubt that some readers will wonder why I included this quotation, since it seems to put down the academic learning that is so highly valued in society today.
I included it because Dr. King said that the highly educated person is no better as a human being than the person who did not receive an academic education and did not excel in school.
Dr. King said that all of us are equal in the eyes of God, no matter how many degrees some have.
Dr. King said that we must respect every other human being as our equal, regardless of their education or social status or income.
Dr. King said that greatness is available to anyone who has “a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
To achieve that greatness does not require high test scores or a Ph.D.
Dr. King met many highly educated people who lacked the character that defined greatness. All of us have seen people in public life who tolerate hatred, bigotry, and violence.
His 1968 comment aligns with his 1963 statement at the March on Washington that he looked forward to the day when his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
He wanted his children and all children to be judged by the content of their character, by “a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wonderful quote. However, King tacitly shows just how far away the idea of “being educated” has drifted away from its core mandate. Insofar as a college education doesn’t give us further and more nuanced access to what it means to mature as a human being and so to develop one’s character, it has failed in already omitting what is central to it. Bells and whistles come to mind. CBK
as an aside, some don’t have a college loan to pay off. Either way , respect the dignity of everyone who chooses to serve.
To your point, Diane, Hitler’s brain, Joseph Goebbels, had a PhD in Philology (the comparative study of ancient languages), with a concentration in Romantic Literature, from the University of Heidelberg. Quite an accomplishment! But Goebbels was one of the most evil and destructive men who ever lived. So, education is necessary but not sufficient. (Btw, Trump’s propaganda Minister, Stephen Miller, seems to have modeled his life and work on that of Goebbels: seize and hold power by fomenting race hatred among the uneducated.)
But, lest you and Dr. King be misunderstood, allow me to spell this out, which should go without saying: I know that both you and King care a great deal about education and the acquisition of knowledge. But knowledge is not enough. That’s the point. As King said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education.” Character is MORE important. One can be a good person and have enormous positive effects on the world without being highly educated. But one cannot without having good character.
If Trump and Miller actually cared about other people, if Trump cared about something other than money and the worship of his god Mammon, if Miller cared about something other than raw power and his insecure need to think himself innately superior to others, then they might actually have done good in the world instead of being forces for division and destruction.
Yes, there is a part of me that feels really bad for the little boy Donnie Trump once was–the boy with the cold, distant parents who fashioned him into a monstrosity of narcissism (look at me, me, me; see, I am worth something). And a part of me feels really bad for the teenager who Stephen Miller was–the incel dweeb who had to compensate by finding power and thinking himself superior to brown people. It must have been awful to experience those things.
But they need treatment, not leadership roles. Clearly. I would dearly love to see them both standing in the dock at the International Court of Criminal Justice, charged with crimes against humanity for what they have done at the southern border. Then, in prison, they might get the treatment they need. That is, if the Trump misadministration hasn’t privatized all the prisons so that they have cut any funding they might have for prison psychotherapists.
Trump: Psycho the rapist needs a psychotherapist.
In his own words….
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/20/special_dr_martin_luther_king_jr
“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve…….You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
Love this quote so much and understand why you included it in your book, which I am looking forward to reading.
Much as I believe Deming encapsulated his thinking and legacy in “A System of Profound Knowledge” comprising the necessity of understanding something about systems, variation, knowledge, psychology and the interrelatedness of these matters without being eminent in any of them, I also believe MLK Jr encapsulated his thinking and legacy in these words as reflected in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Ah, yes, the interrelated structure of reality, which could give a darn about the social construct called “race.” I believe King understood this with great foresight. And so did those for whom “race” was and remains their fear-driven competitive advantage, as with the Disruptors and destroyers of public education.
Kenneth Boulding’s The World as a Total System can be read as strongly reinforcing and amplifying King’s and anyone else’s understanding of the interrelated structure of reality—for example:
“One thing of which we become aware very early in the human learning process is that structures have parts, and that an important aspect of the systemic structure of things is that the relationship among its parts is an important element in the structure and behavior of any system.”
Behaviors of injustice mostly certainly arise from competitive human relationship structures and systems formed of “race”—meaning, “color of skin.” Much better would be behaviors that arise from cooperative human relationship structures and systems formed of “content of character.”
So, for me, MLK Jr remains a profound Systems Thinker above all else attributed to him.
An interesting post, Mr. Johnson! Race is, of course, scientifically a bogus concept, but culturally, it is quite meaningful.
Expertise and Performance: Honoring the Late Leonard Cohen
There’s not a simple relation between these two. Consider, for example, the work of the late Leonard Cohen.
The most technically proficient and knowledgeable jazz guitarist I’ve ever met is ________. The most technically proficient and knowledgeable classical guitarist I’ve ever met is _______. Both have had impressive careers. They’ve played with and instructed great musicians and orchestras. They’ve taught at prestigious universities. (They also had their poor pupil, me. LOL.) But neither achieved the fame and recognition of Leonard Cohen. Cohen himself explained that he had a guitar teacher who taught him a standard flamenco chord progression that he used over and over and over throughout his career. He wasn’t nearly the guitarist that _______ and ________ are. Throw a stick at a music school, and you will find a more proficient one.
Cohen’s singing is widely loved, but he never had, of course, an enormous vocal range or the lung power and control of most any classically trained vocalist. He himself recognized and spoke of the limitations of his singing voice, especially as he got older. But that cracked older voice is the one we most love, isn’t it? The one with all that soul. (“There’s a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”)
His writing is beautiful. But he himself said that it took him a long, long time to get anything right, and he would not have claimed to be a writer of the caliber of Yeats or Blake or Donne or Robert Browning or his own beloved Lorca. Cohen never achieved much success as a novelist or as a writer of books of poetry, though he dabbled in both. Nonetheless, he wrote songs that we want to hear, and occasionally, lines or passages or even whole works as good as any written by anyone, ever (“hungry as an archway”). Some of his songs, like “Hallelujah” or “It Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” or “Chelsea Hotel #2” or “Everybody Knows” stand on their own as truly great poetry, worthy to stand next to the greatest of Yeats or Browning. In fact, I would happily teach Cohen’s “It Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” next to Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto.” Masterworks. Consider these breathtaking lines:
“I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.”
or
“I did my best, it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”
Cohen knew his own limitations (“You told me again you preferred handsome men, but in my case you’d make an exception”), and for this very reason–his CHARACTER, his unusual, stark honesty, his authenticity, his standing naked before us–we found him rare and beautiful. As a man.
And when you put all these things together–that standard chord progression; some minimal folk picking technique; Cohen’s raspy, seductive voice; his writing about matters that people truly care about; the occasional really well-turned line; the wisdom to keep it simple and pure, you have genius. The instrumentation, the voice, the lyrics all work together perfectly, and he perfected each. It’s said that the fox knows many things but that the hedgehog knows one thing really, really well. Well, genius is often like that. It’s a matter of perfecting the simple things, of getting them exactly right. And put that kind of genius and character together-well, you get something you don’t encounter everyday, huh? It doesn’t get any better.
Broad scholarly expertise–is a wondrous thing. Honor those who possess it. Really, you should. But it doesn’t necessarily lead to greatness as a performer or other kind of creative artist. Instead, those creative artists often have character (authenticity) and narrow expertise brought to a very high level of refinement.
Cohen is the Hebrew word for priest.
Thank you. That’s it–thank you.