Lessons Learned from Pawn Stars

Ear­lier today, Tony Bal­dasero posted this:

As his posts tend to do, it got me think­ing about what I’ve learned from the show, not about his­tory, but about teach­ing and learning.

For those read­ers who haven’t seen Pawn Stars, it’s a real­ity show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas. In each episode, cus­tomers bring in var­i­ous objects they want to pawn or sell. The shop own­ers have to appraise the value, nego­ti­ate, and some­times spot the fakes among the real items.

At first blush it seems like an odd fit for the His­tory Chan­nel. But the items that peo­ple bring in are such things as antique firearms, his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, sports mem­o­ra­bilia, even Jimmy Hoffa’s photo album (in the Back­room Brawl episode). As the series star and store owner Rick Har­ri­son says, “Every­thing has a story.”

The stars of the show are a col­lec­tion of not-​​so-​​sophisticated guys who are more likely to trade an item for a new tat­too than to appre­ci­ate the cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of a native artifact.

But there is no deny­ing that these guys know their stuff. Rick, his dad (the “Old Man”), and his son “Hoss” all have a depth of knowl­edge about his­tory and antique objects that never ceases to fas­ci­nate me. In one episode, a cus­tomer walked into the shop with what looked like a rusty hunk of metal, and Rick imme­di­ately iden­ti­fied it as a set of 19^th cen­tury Frog­gatt Plug 8 handcuffs.

A few semi-​​random thoughts that came to mind as I con­sid­ered the show:

1. Learn­ing is not the same as aca­d­e­mics. Rick Har­ri­son dropped out of high school in tenth grade, but he prob­a­bly knows more about his­tory than most col­lege grad­u­ates. Rick has obvi­ously learned an incred­i­ble amount in the years he has been in busi­ness. He works in a par­tic­u­larly unfor­giv­ing field, too—if he’s wrong about an object or its ori­gin and pays more than it’s worth, no one is going to buy it from him out of pity. He’s out of luck. The only way to be a suc­cess in his busi­ness in the long term is to know what you’re doing.
2. You can’t know it all. Despite the exten­sive knowl­edge and exper­tise of the pawn shop staff, they don’t pre­tend to know every­thing. When an item comes in that Rick ques­tions, he calls in a spe­cial­ist. He has a col­lec­tion of experts who he asks to exam­ine items and ver­ify their authen­tic­ity. He’s not afraid to tell a cus­tomer, “I have no idea if this is real or what it might be worth.”
3. There is no “proper” expres­sion of an intel­lec­tual gift. Some might say that the Har­ri­son family’s tal­ent is “wasted” in such a low class oper­a­tion as the pawn busi­ness. But who are we to judge the value that this shop and its own­ers con­tribute to the com­mu­nity or soci­ety? Who or what deter­mines if some­one is a suc­cess, or is achiev­ing at his or her poten­tial? Rick seems to love what he does, and he is good at his cho­sen pro­fes­sion. If we have a stu­dent who is a tal­ented writer, who’s to say that we have to guide that writer to pro­duc­ing “great lit­er­a­ture?” What if his or her pas­sion is to write slap­stick car­toons? Isn’t South Park just as valid an expres­sion of writ­ing tal­ent as Mans­field Park?

I believe we spend a lot of time in edu­ca­tion try­ing to cram stu­dents into the molds we have pre­de­ter­mined are best for them. While we do have an oblig­a­tion to take raw tal­ent and shape it, per­haps we need to look at it the way Michelan­gelo looked at sculp­ture:

Our job is to dis­cover the poten­tial that is already inside the stu­dent and help them real­ize it, not to maneu­ver the stu­dent into becom­ing what we believe they should become.