Conscious Choice: Don't Know Much About Geography

February 2001

Don't Know Much About Geography

What Does It Mean to be Educated?

by Jennifer Grant

You say that the wine is subtle, with nuances of black tea and toffee. You go to films — not movies — and the ones you like, you call "smart." You get in your car, flick on the radio, and know whether it’s Rigoletto or La Traviata before you even have your seatbelt fastened. You’re hard-pressed to name even one popular television show, though you loved the documentary on the Magna Carta that you watched on PBS last night.

To many people in this country, anyone with such erudite tastes is, by default, an educated person. (One would likely not rush to the same conclusion about someone who favors Adam Sandler movies, six-packs of beer, and barbecue-flavored potato chips.)

Is, then, an inventory of what we consume a reliable indicator of whether we are educated? Or are educated people marked by their rich inner life? Do they concern themselves with helping others? Protecting the environment? Or is it simpler than all of this: is an educated person simply someone with a college degree?

This last definition seems to be the dominant one in our country today. As much as we talk about education in our presidential campaigns and newspaper editorials, we are not a people who cherish the life of the mind. The staggering amount of time we spend reading, talking, and thinking about the personal lives of celebrities exposes this in us. Many see the value of education as merely financial — those with more years of it usually make more money.

In his recent article "The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/8/2000), New York University professor Todd Gitlin says that the 2000 presidential campaign has brought the American public’s disregard for intellectuality to light. Gitlin points out that Al Gore was often disparaged for being "too smart for his own good" and that the significance of George W. Bush’s many misstatements and malapropisms was minimized. He asserts that George W. Bush "went to the right schools and passed through them without any detectable mark" and criticizes Bush most harshly for what Gitlin terms his lack of intellectual curiosity.

"So it came to pass that half of the voting population was appalled that the other half judged this man of...little knowledge of the world or curiosity about it, to be an acceptable president of the United States," writes Gitlin.

Fundamental to his acerbic and well-reasoned critique of present-day anti-intellectualism is Gitlin’s conviction that there is much more to being educated than having graduated from college — or even having possession of a pair of degrees from Harvard and Yale. A thirst for knowledge, an acceptance of the hard work that critical thinking requires, and an ability to reason seem to be key components of his conception of the traits that characterize an educated person.

Gitlin’s ideas stem at least in part from the humanist notion — forged in the late Middle Ages — that to be educated is to be a life-long learner and that educated people interact more thoughtfully with their society.

Philosophers and educators have puzzled over the question of what it means to be educated for millennia. Aristotle, born in 384 BC, had a stunning intellectual life and worked in a vast range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, zoology, and logic. He thought that all people should be joyfully committed to cultivating their minds. He asserted that educated people are the happiest of people because they are able to act "rightly and nobly" and they are dearest to the gods because their work most closely resembles the work of the deities. "Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy," he wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, (Book 10, chapter 8).

By this description, Americans today wouldn’t qualify as happy people. We fill every available quiet moment with chatter as we frenetically rush to perform a multitude of tasks. We are bombarded with television advertisements that portray successful Americans as the ones who are able simultaneously to talk on the cell phone, drive a car, and eat fast food. Consume more; contemplate less: that’s the underlying message.

Keepers of the Culture

A thousand or so years before Aristotle, priests in Egypt and Mesopotamia were the careful guardians of education. The primary goal of education was to preserve cultural purity. Priests kept a tight rein on what was included in the curriculum. Formal schooling in mathematics, science, and the humanities was offered, but only to privileged boys and young men. These students began school at age five and completed their formal schooling at about age seventeen.

This idea that an educated person is one who is able both to transmit culture and to fend off forces that would diversify the beliefs and traditions of a society has remained throughout history. The Puritans of New England, as well as many others, shared this conception of education.

So did the Aztecs and the Incas, who taught historical and religious knowledge by the oral presentation of poems, songs, and speeches. At the close of a four-year program, Inca students were required to take rigorous exams on the Quechua language, geometry, and several other subjects. On passing these exams, the students would take their places in the Inca nobility. Their exams seem to foreshadow our own Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs); critics even note that performance on the SATs more accurately indicates socioeconomic status than academic potential. (In our cynical time, no one even expresses the hope that the high scorer on the SATs is a lover of learning.)

E.D. Hirsch, whose most famous work is The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, similarly maintains that the educated person is one who is "culturally literate" and that educated people "share a broad range of specific information." His Dictionary delineates the parameters of this information and provides thousands of entries on over twenty subjects including The Bible, Conventions of Written English, and American History. But Jonathan Larson, author of Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, asserts that "the day when an‘educated’ person could be a useless drone with some high-brow avocations is over.

"[Hirsch’s] book claims it has what every American needs to know, yet as far as I am concerned, until every American knows how his car produces nitrous oxides, how his food is grown, or knows the chemistry of what is under his kitchen sink, he does not have the time or energy to learn about the Greek god of boozing, who Ruth was, or why Lear had trouble with his daughters," Larson writes on Elegant Technology Online.

Both men seem to be arguing that Americans should raise the bar regarding our notion of what it means to be educated. To be educated is more than having a college degree, more than being culturally literate, more than appreciating what is considered "highbrow" culture. Clearly, though, to be educated is to be curious about the world we live in, to be interested in exploring issues, including the kinds of issues that Larson raises. How is our food grown? How can we feed those who aren’t being fed? How does the way we live affect the life of the planet? Why does it matter?

There is much for us to wonder about; countless strange and delightful ideas, inventions, and creatures can set our minds wandering. Charmed quarks. Sea cucumbers. The blues of W.C. Handy. Seurat’s Pointillism. Icons. Whirling dervishes. Fireflies and shooting stars. But until Americans can put a stop to the incessant noise that we have grown accustomed to accommodating, we will never be able to enjoy the kind of happiness that Aristotle described. Until we can turn the culture’s motto upside-down and learn to consume less and contemplate more, we will not become the happy citizens who are known for acting "rightly and nobly." Like our current "leader," we’ll have to go to the right schools and buy the right things and pass through life without leaving a discernable and valuable mark.

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