The thing about Thor Heyerdahl is he built the stupid boat.
He didn't build a scale model, or a computer simulation. Not a peer-reviewed paper exploring the theoretical possibility of papyrus reed vessels surviving Atlantic crossings, footnoted to within an inch of its life, hedged with enough caveats to satisfy a committee of anxious deans. He built an actual boat out of actual reeds, got on it with six other lunatics, and sailed it across an actual ocean to see what would happen.
Ra I sank. Well, nearly. Limped into Barbados half-drowned and thoroughly humiliated. The academic establishment nodded knowingly. Of course it failed. Papyrus boats can't survive ocean crossings. That's why we said it was impossible in the first place. Theory vindicated. Case closed. Everyone go home.
Except Heyerdahl didn't go home. He built another one.
This is where it gets interesting. This is where Ra II stops being a maritime stunt and becomes something educators ought to pay attention to. Because the second time around, Heyerdahl did something revolutionary: he shut up and listened. Specifically, he listened to Aymara boat builders from Lake Titicaca who actually remembered how to build these things, who'd been building them for generations whilst Western engineers were theorising about hydrodynamics in comfortable offices.
Ra II made it. Sailed from Morocco to Barbados, papyrus reeds intact, academic assumptions in tatters.
What did this prove about ancient Egyptian maritime capabilities? Almost nothing directly. What did it prove about how we approach questions, about the difference between studying something and inhabiting it, about the gap between the map and the ocean? Everything.
I'm a musician. I spend my professional life wrestling with a paradox that would make Zeno weep: I cannot recreate the past, yet I'm expected to perform it. We analyse treatises written by people who've been dead for three centuries. We study original instruments that sit behind glass in museums. We debate ornamentation practices with the fervour of Talmudic scholars arguing over a semicolon.
All of this is valuable. Essential, even. But there's a point where you have to stop reading about how Bach fingered a trill and actually play the bloody thing. There's a moment where analysis must yield to action, where theory must meet salt water, where you have to build the boat and see if it floats.
Heyerdahl understood this. The academic consensus said papyrus boats couldn't survive ocean crossings. Fine. Lovely theory. Let's test it.
This is what makes Ra I and Ra II more than adventure tourism for overeducated Norwegians with a death wish. They were sailing in the present. That's the insight that hit me like a rogue wave when I first read The Ra Expeditions. They weren't trying to become ancient Egyptians. They couldn't be. The crew was international, Cold War era, equipped with modern safety gear, documented by film cameras. They were 20th-century people using ancient techniques to test contemporary assumptions about historical possibilities.
When I perform Baroque music, I'm not an 18th-century court musician. I can study treatises on ornamentation until my eyes bleed. I can learn period instruments. I can absorb performance practice, immerse myself in historical context, dream in figured bass. But I remain fundamentally, irreducibly a 21st-century musician engaging with historical material from my own temporal and cultural position.
The question isn't 'how would Bach have played this?' We can never know with certainty. Memory doesn't survive death and recordings didn't exist. The question is 'what happens when I, with my training, my cultural context, my artistic voice, engage with this material in this moment?'
Heyerdahl's expeditions model this perfectly. He engaged with ancient boat-building techniques not to somehow become an ancient Egyptian through the magic of historical cosplay, but to understand what those techniques made possible. He inhabited the practice rather than merely theorising about it from the safety of a library carrel.
Experimentation is knowledge. Building and sailing Ra I taught them more about papyrus boat construction than years of library research could have. The failure wasn't wasted effort. It revealed exactly what the theoretical models couldn't predict. This is education as discovery, not as the transmission of fixed facts from full vessels to empty ones.
Mistakes are necessary. Ra I nearly made it but ultimately failed. Rather than treating this as embarrassing defeat, as evidence they should have stayed home and stuck to theory, Heyerdahl and his crew analysed what went wrong, adjusted their approach, and tried again. They didn't know they would succeed until they did. This willingness to fail publicly, to risk looking foolish, to acknowledge uncertainty in front of cameras and journalists and everyone who'd said it couldn't be done... this is precisely what conservative educational institutions systematically discourage.
We've built an education system that punishes failure so severely that students learn to avoid it at all costs. Better to do nothing than to do something and get it wrong. Better to reproduce the safe answer than to test a dangerous hypothesis. The result: technically proficient musicians who've never found their own voice. Engineers who can calculate stress loads but can't imagine a new bridge. Writers who've mastered grammar but have nothing to say.
Traditional knowledge matters. The second expedition succeeded largely because they brought in boat builders who actually remembered how reed vessels should be constructed. Western engineering assumptions, all that lovely scientific certainty about material properties and hull design, had to yield to indigenous expertise. This is a profound lesson about epistemology that most universities still haven't learned: not all knowledge lives in journals. Some knowledge is embodied, practical, transmitted through tradition rather than text. Some knowledge lives in the hands of people who've been doing the thing whilst academics theorise about whether the thing can be done.
Context is everything. You cannot understand a boat by studying blueprints. You must put it in water. Similarly, you cannot understand music by analysing scores. Cannot grasp historical practices through treatises alone. At some point you must perform, must make sound, must test theory against reality and let reality win when it contradicts your beautiful hypotheses.
The present is unavoidable. Heyerdahl couldn't escape being a mid-20th-century Norwegian with a controversial hypothesis and a flair for publicity, and he didn't try to. His crew was deliberately international, reflecting contemporary values about cooperation and cultural exchange. They documented everything with modern technology. They were using ancient techniques to explore questions relevant to their own time, not engaging in some fantasy about authentic recreation where everyone pretends indoor plumbing doesn't exist.
Recreation implies we can somehow bring the past back to life unchanged, can step into it as if no time had passed, as if history were a costume we could put on and take off at will. This is fantasy. The past is gone. We cannot resurrect it. The dead stay dead and their world died with them.
But we can reimagine it. We can ask: what if these techniques worked? What would that make possible? How does practical experience change our theoretical understanding? What happens when we move from the map to the ocean, from the treatise to the instrument, from the theory to the test?
This is what education should do. Not transmit fixed knowledge about a dead past, as if history were a collection of facts to be memorised and regurgitated on command. But help students actively reimagine historical possibilities and their relevance to the present. Not produce perfect reproductions of established interpretations, but develop independent thinkers who can engage critically and creatively with tradition.
Before Ra, theoretical objections to ancient trans-Atlantic contact seemed definitive. The boats couldn't survive. Therefore, ancient contact was impossible. Therefore, we needn't consider it. Theory had spoken. After Ra, we knew those objections were based on untested assumptions. This didn't prove ancient contact happened. It proved it could have happened. The realm of historical possibility expanded.
That's what genuine inquiry does. It opens doors rather than closing them. It expands what we know is possible rather than defending what we've already decided must be true.
What I admire most about Heyerdahl, what makes The Ra Expeditions essential reading for anyone who teaches anything, is the sheer audacity of it. The willingness to look ridiculous. To risk failure in front of the world. To challenge expert consensus not with another theory but with practical demonstration.
Academia rewards caution. It rewards exhaustive literature reviews, careful qualifications, hedged conclusions. It does not reward building reed boats and sailing them across oceans on the off chance you might learn something. It does not reward looking foolish. It does not reward being wrong in public.
But education desperately needs more of Heyerdahl's spirit. We need students who are willing to test assumptions, to ask 'what if we actually tried this?' We need teachers who model intellectual courage, who demonstrate that sometimes you have to build the boat and see what happens, even if the experts say it can't be done.
Conservatories produce technically accomplished musicians who are creatively stifled, afraid of mistakes, disconnected from the joy that drew them to music in the first place. They can reproduce but cannot create. They can colour inside the lines but panic when you hand them a blank canvas. This is what happens when education becomes about avoiding failure rather than courting it, when perfection becomes the enemy of experimentation.
Heyerdahl offers an antidote. He shows that meaningful inquiry often requires risk. That failure can teach more than success. That sometimes you learn by doing rather than by studying what others have done.