Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge,
    but whoever hates correction is stupid.

Proverbs 12:1

I wanted to focus on this verse today because it contains a pearl of wisdom which, in our highly sophisticated time, we tend to look right past the obvious. Check this out: A person who loves discipline loves knowledge. I never really thought of it that way. I would have pegged discipline with success, but not necessarily with knowledge, although they go together nicely. To put it another way, I always thought of discipline more in connection with football coaches.

Now that I think about it, there is quite a lot of discipline involved in acquiring knowledge. Yet, to the extent that I have ever learned anything, it came by doing things that I enjoyed doing and never thought of as work, unlike in football, where everything involved work, sweat and pain which are not on my list of favorite things.

Now we come to the stupid part. Notice that this verse compares and contrasts discipline leading to knowledge, with dislike of being corrected, resulting in stupidity; let’s think about that.

Off hand, I can’t think of anyone I’ve ever known who set about their day trying to be corrected; no one likes it, including me. Many will fight correction and argue and shout for hours rather than admit they could have been wrong about something. In my own experience, I have been corrected by people in error, and I have been corrected when I was in error. To figure out the difference, I eventually realized that it can be a good idea to listen with an open mind, and carefully consider what is being said before making a judgment about who is right. When I am the one who is mistaken, the other person has just done me a favor: I gained knowledge. If we always reject any correction out of hand, we will never gain knowledge; our choice perpetuates our ignorance, and that is a stupid choice.

Yet, no one really likes being corrected. Could it be that accepting correction is the greatest discipline of all?