Educating is not transferring knowledge from someone who knows to someone who doesn't: it's an encounter between different kinds of knowledge, mediated by the world, in which everyone learns.
The line is from Paulo Freire, and it sums up something that is now at the core of how I think about mentorship: "nobody educates anybody, nobody educates themselves, people educate each other, mediated by the world." It rejects, in one stroke, the two most common fantasies about learning: the teacher who deposits knowledge into someone, and the self-taught person who learns entirely alone. What remains is the encounter: people learning from one another, with the real world as the mediator.
A few other Freire ideas I carry alongside that one, and that I use literally as practical criteria:
- Humility is an epistemological stance, not politeness: "nobody is superior to anybody."
- A difference in background is not a hierarchy: "there is no more knowledge or less knowledge. There are different kinds of knowledge."
- Incompleteness is universal: "nobody is ignorant of everything, nobody knows everything. We all know something, we are all ignorant of something. That's why we keep learning."
I've mentored over 3,000 product professionals over the years, from beginners to executives at large companies, and this is the lens I use: any structured learning relationship (mentorship, onboarding, PM training, team leadership) works better when it's designed as an exchange between different kinds of knowledge, not as the transmission of a stock of ready-made answers.
A mentor who positions themselves as the single source blocks the very mechanism through which people learn: joint elaboration, mediated by real problems. In practice, this means trading lectures for conversations about the concrete cases of whoever I'm mentoring, treating the person's experience as legitimate knowledge, and measuring success by the autonomy generated, not the dependency created.