Ignorance is Bliss…..And Dangerous

In ninth grade I learned that Washington Irving was the Father of American Fiction.  Classrooms are fond of making kids memorize fathers of things—Father of Modern Astronomy (Nicholas Copernicus), Father of Quantum Mechanics (Max Planck), Father of the French Sailing Navy (Jean-Baptiste Colbert—-remember, you learned it here).  I think it is gender-ironic that with all these Fathers of Things we use the phrase “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”  But I digress. Irving received this accolade because, at a time when the United States, struggling for independence and recognition on the world stage, Irving gave the new nation a “cultural past.”  He did this by “borrowing” the plots of old Germanic folk tales and setting them in the Catskills and other New York environs.  The Knickerbocker Tales, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are examples. So early Americans could say “Yippee!  We gots a cultural past.  Some American guy wrote a book I can’t read!”   In graduate school, I learned something else.  Washington Irving contributed to our nation’s legacy of anti-intellectualism.   Take The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  The schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, is bested by Bones Brummel, a bare chested frontiersman whose SAT scores would have kept him out of Jed Clampett’s Finishing School.  The theme is apparent in the story (and in Irving’s other works).  If the nation is to survive we don’t need smart, educated people. We need to produce the Bones Brummels to fell the forests, to explore the wilderness, and to fell the local natives so the nation could grow.

It would be understandable, ethics aside, if the wave of anti-intellectualism ended on the sands of our country’s origins.  But the history of the United States is replete with the ridicule of educated minds, of “egg heads,” of nerds who actually read books.  Candidates for high office worked hard during campaigns to insure the voters that they were not “one of them,” that they were not  book learners—that they were not college schooled but emerged wholly ignorant from Hicksville..   Even into modern times, office seekers distance themselves from any supposition of intellectualism, non-referencing their Ivy League backgrounds and posing for the cameras while chain sawing twigs, and strolling through factories, hard hats on heads and sleeves rolled up, and pretending to drive tanks.

Our education system is still predicated on a post-World War II factory model.  During the war we massed produced tanks and ships and planes and GI’s.  Why not mass produce students, most of whom did not need to learn a great deal (or possess high level thinking skills) to work on assembly lines?  A few students would have to learn more to run the factories and an even smaller group would have to fill their brains with additional skills to own those institutions.

I was raised on science fiction movies in which the subtle (and not-so-subtle) anti-smart motifs surfaced.  The hero of the movie was always a well-built lad who faced the monster, the gigantic ant or gila monster or radiated newt, with courage and persistence. He saved the world and the pretty young thing (best known for holding the back of her hand up to her mouth as the monster came closer).  Her uncle or father or grandfather was always an aged scientist sporting an Albert Einstein hairdo.   This character could build a complex nuclear device that would eventually destroy the monster, but he could not find his shoes or the glasses atop his head without the aid of his niece/daughter/granddaughter.   Message sent: you can be smart OR practical…..as if both adjectives are mutually exclusive.

The truth is that, in the United States, we celebrate, even idolize, the know nothings, the blissfully ignorant, and we treat with disdain, distrust, and scorn those who are actually book smart.  This reality was reinforced during my tenure as high school teacher.  “Cool kids” did not open books or study history or ask great questions (they were aspiring Fonzies without the moral compass), while those who did were forced to spend too much time avoiding the bullying of their small-minded classmates.  Too many parents were more concerned about their child’s social status than their academic status. These would also be the first parents who would want the federal government to “do something” about the fact that the best jobs would go to the deserving and hardworking non-Americans rather than their lazier cherubs.

On a few occasions a student would say something like, “Literature is stupid. History is stupid.”  I would ask the student to explain this belief.  The answer was usually, “It is just my opinion.”  This became a lead-in to one of my favorite explorations—the difference between an opinion and an educated opinion.  An educated opinion is a belief bolstered by facts, facts garnered from history or science or math—from reality.   All opinions, at the risk of sounding undemocratic, are not equal.  One can have the opinion that the sun revolves around the earth or that drinking arsenic is a good thing or that the Sixers are the best team in the NBA, but an educated opinion might beg to differ on those beliefs. Our Founding Fathers (and their wives!), were products of the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. They understood the perils inherent in a democratic system.   If the nation were to progress, and the right people chosen to govern, if would have to occur by the populace using educated opinions, leaning on truth rather than emotion.  There are also educated choices.

Last week Polley gave me a synopsis of a newspaper article which equated the coal industry with the defunct whaling industry.  The out-of-a-job whalers were probably serenaded by politicians who promised to bring back the whaling business. I imagine the candidate promised, “I’m gonna bring the whaling business back to your town. I’m gonna bring back the whales, and, if they don’t come back, I’m gonna make artificial whales so you can hunt them.”  An educated person would debunk that assertion from a scientific, historical, and mathematical set of truths.  The uneducated would vote for the politician.  Our modern Bones Brummels, frustrated at being out of work, do not point to their own lack of learning or inability to adapt.  Instead they blame those who work hard and who have the least power to defend themselves.

Futurists believe that the students who graduate high school now will probably have five or six jobs in the course of a lifetime. Alvin Toffler, noted author of Future Shock 1970, stated that people adapting to changing economic climates will have to “learn, unlearn, and learn again.”  Modern schools should be all about teaching students learning skills, particularly high level thinking skills so they can adapt and make educated opinions.  The former whalers would have to learn a new profession.   This might require reading.

Today our factories are gone for the most part.  Our nation’s niche in the current geopolitical climate is our ability to creatively problem solve.  I was fortunate to be awarded a Fulbright to study schools in Japan.  I was also lucky to discuss those schools with a Minister of Education.  I asked him the difference between the education of the Japanese and the education of Americans. His answer:

“Well, we built our system based on your system just after the war, like baseball.  But here is the essential difference.  In the United States you create a problem, you solve the problem, and you market the solution.  In Japan we can make a better solution, and we can market it more efficiently…..what we cannot do is create the problem.”

Creating the problem takes smarts, and, yes, a fair amount of “book learning.” How are we going to compete in the world market if we continue to celebrate and applaud ignorance while scoffing intellect?  The jobs we want our children and grandchildren to have high level thinking skills learned not on the streets, but the kind of intelligence gleaned from libraries and classrooms.  How long can our nation excel on the world stage if we choose to prepare out offspring for the past rather than prepare them for the future?

Of all the possible scary realizations that arose from this past presidential election, one of the most frightening is that the tide of anti-intellectualism has gained momentum and will wash over our nation like a giant tsunami of ignorance. My book learning has taught me that empires come and go. We wear uneasily (and that is a good thing) the mantle of “American Empire.”  But the demise of empires is usually rooted in laziness, lack of foresight, and ignorance. Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has Huck’s father, Pap, rant against Huck’s learning in school, and boasting of his own narrowmindedness predicated on bigotry and specious reasoning.  Arthur Miller debunked the myth of the self-made man in Death of a Salesman.  Bernard, the next door neighbor’s “nerdy” son is the only one who succeeds while Willy Loman, self-made failure, purposely drives his car into a tree.   Washington Irving may have given us a cultural past, but he also contributed to a legacy of self-serving ignorance which haunts us today.  And though his tales celebrate the victories of the thick headed, well, they are just stories. Don’t believe me. Make an educated opinion. Look it up.