We all
have incomplete educations. Moreover, what we have often dissipates over time
as is amply demonstrated on Are You
Smarter Than a 5th Grader, an enjoyable TV game show on which
successful adult professionals (some of them academics) repeatedly reveal they
are not. All questions on the show come from 5th grade textbooks.
Yet, since 2007 only two contestants, including Nobel winning physicist George Smoot, have won the million dollar prize. Our failings run the gamut
from Accounting to Zoology. Earlier this autumn Libertarian presidential
candidate Gary Johnson badly damaged his campaign by flubbing a question on
Aleppo, but he has plenty of geographically-challenged company. In a country in
which a majority of people receive at least some higher education beyond high
school, most Americans nonetheless cannot even find Syria on a map. (They can’t
find Afghanistan either, even though American troops have been fighting and
dying there for 15 years.) Back in 2013 Washington
Post columnist Ezra Klein argued in all seriousness that this
doesn’t matter so long as they can Google the answer: “In this era of labeled
maps, Google Earth, and, well, Google, the question isn't whether you can find
Syria on a map. It's whether you can find useful information about Syria in
your browser.”
I
can’t state emphatically enough how much I disagree – not just about Syria in
particular but about the whole notion that an internet connection is a
substitute for knowledge. It is not. Nor is it a substitute for skill. It is
not unimportant to be able to add or spell just because one’s laptop has a
calculator and autocorrect. Knowing how and when to look up additional
information is all very fine, but creativity and thoughtful analysis depend on
the ability to make connections among disparate bits of knowledge in one’s own
head. That doesn’t work if the bits aren’t there. If we let a machine think for
us, any kudos for the result belong entirely to the machine.
That
said, I’m acutely aware of the huge gaps that exist in my own education. One
way to fill in enough gaps at least to fake it at a dinner party with truly
well-informed people is to read cover to cover An Incomplete Education: 3684 Things You Should Have Learned but
Probably Didn’t (Third Edition) by Judy Jones and William Wilson. This
certainly is a goal of mine, so last week I read the book. What’s your weakness?
Art history? Anthropology? Poetry? Psychology? Philosophy? How about the names
of the various types of carriages or the details of pre-decimal British
currency? An amazing amount of information (yes, including about Syria) is in
this 700 page compendium. It’s no substitute for in-depth studies, of course,
but it will get one through that dinner party without sounding like a dullard. It
also gives the reader a framework for more self-education if he or she is so
inclined. Besides, who knows what new thoughts will come from all those new
bits of info inside one’s own head? We’ll have to see if any pop into my own.
Thumbs
up.
Sam Cooke. (I considered Know
Nothing by Travis, but video embedding for the song is disabled by request
of the rights-holders.)
I've got that book as well, and it's a good recommendation even if one just thumbs through it casually. Your dinner parties must be more refined than those I attend. Most of them consist of: Did you see the new Ricky & Morty or something about the latest movie one saw or even something about a comic book find. I guess I run in geekier circles. :) But yes, friends and gatherings are hard to beat.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty cool bunch that haphazardly accumulated over the years for our parties. They have nothing in common and span 7 decades but that seems to be what makes it work. Your gang sounds like just as much fun.
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