I’ve noticed something surprising lately, an increasing acceptance of the view that – in today’s wired society – it’s no longer necessary to know or remember key facts.
According to this school of thought (to use the term loosely), it makes no sense to clutter your mind with names and dates, geography and science, tenets of philosophy or turning points in history. After all, if you need to know something, Google and Wikipedia are just a click away.
There are, to be sure, still a few of us who don’t consider our smart phones and tablets new appendages. But even if you’re connected 24/7, are you really going to hold up your hand during a conversation and say, “Bill of Rights. Hmm. That sounds important. Let me just check something here?”
Shared meanings are essential for effective communication. In particular, reading with comprehension requires more than just recognizing the words on the page. It requires broad specific knowledge. It isn’t possible – and shouldn’t be necessary – for a writer to explain who Leonardo da Vinci was, or when the Crusades happened, or what occurred at Yorktown. The reader needs to know.
Yet many today are embracing the opposite view – the University of Google – instead. And the picture is not always a flattering one.
Jay Leno does a standard set piece where he quizzes passersby on the streets of New York. In one episode, he asks a young man where the Pope lives.
“England,” he replies.
“Where in England?” Leno follows, keeping a straight face.
“Ummm, Paris.”
He asks another pedestrian, “What’s another name for the War Between the States?” The man protests. “Is this the kind of stuff we’re supposed to know off the top of our heads?”
The smart responses wind up on the cutting room floor, of course. Correct answers are not comedy. But it appears that Leno has tapped into something very real.
In a recent survey, 52% of high school graduates chose Germany, Japan or Italy over the Soviet Union as a U.S. ally in World War II. A third put the Civil War in the twentieth century. Two-thirds could not explain a photo of a theater whose portal reads “COLORED ENTRANCE.” Yet 64% could identify the Kardashians.
Increasingly, our culture debases more than it uplifts. Passive entertainment has turned many adults into perpetual adolescents. “We are increasingly ignorant,” lamented W.A. Panapacker, “but we do not know enough to be properly ashamed.”
It wasn’t always this way. Throughout most of the twentieth century, there was a massive demand among the middle class for intellectual betterment. Individual volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s ten-thousand-page magnum opus The Story of Civilization climbed The New York Times bestseller list. Countless households purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica and Great Books collections. In the 80s, millions tuned in to watch economist Milton Friedman’s 10-hour PBS Series Free to Choose.
So much popular entertainment today is facile. Yet a 2011 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics found that Americans spend an average of 2.7 hours a day watching TV and an equal amount online. Offline reading amounts to only 20 minutes a day. Using leisure time to acquire knowledge, wisdom and understanding is increasingly viewed as anachronistic, if the idea is considered at all.
We are particularly ignorant of history and civics. However, if you don’t know what is protected by the First Amendment, you can’t do much “critical thinking” about rights in the U.S. If you don’t know which countries border Israel, it’s hard to fathom the situation in the Middle East. Basic facts like these – what some call core knowledge – are an indispensable starting point for deeper insight and genuine literacy.
Part of the problem is the way history is taught. In The History Boys, playwright Alan Bennett points out that history is not taught as an unfolding of events, a series of power struggles or even a clash of ideas, but rather “just one f***ing thing after another.”
And in no particular order. British historian Niall Ferguson suggests that only a tiny fraction of the public knows the chronological march (given here) of these key events: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the First World War.
If we don’t know the order in which these things occurred, we can’t make the causal connections. Historical events are unintelligible if they lack narrative flow or are remembered in the wrong order. Without an accurate timeline in your head, you can’t think about things properly.
As Ferguson writes, “Although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter. First, the current world population makes up approximately seven percent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, in other words, fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the past is really the only reliable source of knowledge about the fleeting present and to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen.”
History informs us about today. We use historical insights to see the present more clearly, to understand what is happening and why, to decide what actions we need to take now. As Harry Truman declared, “The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know.”
We easily outstrip our ancestors in wealth, creature comforts, health and lifespan. We exceed them in the breadth of our political freedom and the security that governments provide. But a culture that does not know or understand the past risks the kind of backwardness that led Edward Gibbon to call the Romans at the apex of their empire “a race of pygmies.” It is only through persistent seeking – the thirst to understand – that we achieve and appreciate great things.
Education, properly understood, is the occupation not of childhood, but of a whole life. We should each be on a quest to discover what Matthew Arnold famously called “the best which has been thought and said.”
Fortunately, we have a breadth and ease of access far greater than what was available to earlier generations. And the cost has never been lower. In fact, much of it is free. There is plenty of great content available at iTunes University and Khan Academy. Conversations and lectures by brilliant historians like David McCullough, Gordon Wood and Stephen Ambrose are available on YouTube. Or, if you prefer the analog world, you can always resort to the most beautiful word in the English language: the library.
There are practical reasons for remedying our ignorance, too. Recent research into the relationship between health and education found that better-educated people live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes. We also know there is a direct correlation between a well-educated population and a stable, free society.
Too often, education is seen as something purely financial, vocational or utilitarian. We have lost sight of the lifelong ideal of simply becoming educated.
Yet we are the beneficiaries of an enormous civic and cultural inheritance. Should we not strive to understand it?
As Liel Leibovitz of Tablet writes, “If you’re serious about reading – or, for that matter, about your education – see to it attentively. Revisit Homer and read your way through human history. Don’t stop until you reach Kafka. Or, better yet, don’t stop until you see the entire vista of culture spread before you and feel yourself every bit a part of it.”
Carpe Diem,
Alex
Alexander Green is the Investment Director of 
