A mystery is just knowledge that only works for you if you get it in your head in the right way, so the line between esoteric and exoteric knowledge can be really fuzzy. There was a time when the idea of someone sitting quietly gazing at a piece of stained parchment and coming away knowing something they didn’t know before was considered pretty freaky, now it’s the very standard of non-mystery.

I think the key (corresponding) mystery of the present moment is digital literacy. While you can write a book on how to find what you’re looking for (and judge what you’ve found) on the web or in a large database, the course of study pretty well has to be hands-on — you learn how to use Google well by doing it, or not at all, even if the doing can be guided by information which is transmitted explicitly.

You mentioned a hermit, and I thought of the Hermit of the tarot deck, who carries a lantern — just like the initiates of the honest-to-goddess mystery tradition just up the road. They are, like all lanterns, for seeing clearly, and one important reason to see clearly (especially under the patronage of Athena, who has always been about getting things done) is in order to act effectively. The mystery that doesn’t lead to competence is not the true mystery.

I haven’t thought about this for a while, but one of the highlights of my undergraduate experience was being involved on the faculty committee which was involved in re-writing the general education requirements, and which ended up changing them so that they were no longer based around disciplinary categories, but rather around skill areas, and I think this was a positive change.

Part of what came up in that conversation was the idea that if you’re going to talk about teaching you have to acknowledge that there’s a best case scenario in which the student achieves everything the institution would hope for, and a worst case scenario in which the student does only that which they’re forced to do. For obvious reasons this was particularly relevant to a discussion of the General Education requirements, but I think it’s generally true.

I think of the language of “skills, competencies, literacies (and related concepts)” as part of that worst case/nuts and bolts perspective. You don’t want the goals of classroom teaching reduced to a bare minimum of measurable outcomes but, at the same time, there should be measurable outcomes (or, at least, skills that could be measured were you so inclined).

It seems worth it to, at some point, have a conversation between different instructors and different disciplines about what it is, at a very basic level, that a student will be exposed to if they study in that discipline, and the degree to which those skills are shared across disciplines or unique.