67. The specter of the cult of ignorance
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Here’s a note I got after a recent blog post used the word bespoke, a much better fit than the word custom would have been:
Bespoke? A word used only for sending people to the dictionary to discover how literate you are—a word they’ll use only for the same purpose. Right?
Andrew
Really?
My blog is hardly filled with words most educated citizens would have trouble understanding. And yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level. This relentless push for less (less intelligence, less culture, less effort) is one of the boogiemen facing anyone who would mess with the rote rigor of mass schooling.
“If we spend more time training inquisitive humans, we’ll have to give up on the basics, and that will mean nothing but uneducated dolts who don’t even know who Torquemada was.”
Not to mention all those missing apostrophes.
I’m worried too. But one thing is clear: the uneducated already don’t know who Torquemada was. The uneducated have already dumbed everything down to sound bites and YouTube clips. The industrial school had several generations and billions of dollars to drill and practice us into game show champions, and it has failed, miserably.
Cultural literacy is essential. A common store of knowledge is the only way to create community, to build and integrate a tribe of people interested in living together in harmony. But that store of knowledge will never be infinite, and what’s more important, we cannot drill and practice it into a population that has so many fascinating or easy diversions available as alternatives.
I’m concerned about fact ignorance and history ignorance and vocabulary ignorance.
I’m petrified, though, about attitude ignorance.
If we teach our students to be passionate, ethical, and inquisitive, I’m confident that the facts will follow. Instead of complaining that I’m using a seven-letter word when a six-letter one might be sufficient, the inquisitive reader thanks me for adding a new, better word to his lexicon. No need to memorize that word—it’s now, and forever, a mouse click away.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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