The burden of ignorance

by Greg Swann

“I want my kids not taught the evolutionary theories.”

So said Mr. Michael Jackson of Hutchinson, Kansas. He was speaking at a meeting of the Kansas State Board of Education, which was hearing testimony on whether or not to omit the study of “the evolutionary theories”—biological, geological and cosmological—from the official state-approved curriculum of the public schools.

And Mr. Jackson should take heart. There is little chance that his kids will be taught much of anything in the public schools, even if the board had not voted his way. It’s disconcerting to see those words that way—“I want my kids not taught”—but it is the very rare public school that does not seek for children to be not taught virtually everything that can be known. Not-teaching is what they’re best at.

But what Mr. Jackson said next is interesting:

“I don’t believe there is any truth to them.”

The hearing room was packed, and presumably there was at least one teacher in the room. Not an ‘educator’, a real teacher. Maybe not. In any case, no one stood up and said, in the clear, quiet voice of reason, “On the basis of what evidence, Mr. Jackson, do you conclude that there is no truth to them?”

It’s a simple enough question, and I can think of many more to follow it. They’re all rhetorical, because I don’t think Mr. Jackson or the members of the board who voted his way have any good answers to them. Here are just a few:

• Is it reasonable to argue that a proposition is false even though it is supported by massive amounts of uncontradicted evidence?
• Is it reasonable to argue that an alternative proposition is true even though it is denied by massive amounts of uncontradicted evidence?
• Is it reasonable to argue that the schoolchildren of Kansas should be denied access to those massive amounts of uncontradicted evidence?
• Is it reasonable to argue that the schoolchildren of Kansas should be discouraged from studying a theoretical framework that attempts to organize and explain those massive amounts of uncontradicted evidence?
• Is it reasonable to argue that a subjective belief, no matter how deeply felt, should govern what is or is not taught in the schools, the supposed citadels of reason?

Does Mr. Jackson have answers to these questions? Do the school board members? I do, or I think I do, but what I mainly have are more questions...

I like just that much of that poem, Auguries of Innocence by William Blake. The rest of it is rather Kansan, to coin a slur. But I love the idea of finding the world in a grain of sand, and I believe in that idea most fervently. And if I could hold eternity in an hour, I’d spend that hour at the library.

But even that might not be enough. I’ve spent hour after hour in libraries, and many hours more at home with my books. I’ve learned and studied and studied and learned, but nothing ever seems to help, not enough.

You see, I have an incurable illness. It hasn’t killed me yet, but it will be a happy accident if it doesn’t get me in the end.

My affliction? I was born ignorant. So were you. And even though I do everything I can to fight that awful scourge, I will die ignorant. So will you. Thus are we made, necessarily, unavoidably, inescapably.

Do I hear the sput-sput-sputterings of your but-but-buts? There are no buts. We are born void of knowledge—allowing for quibbles about squawking and suckling if you insist. We spend years and years pondering one grain of sand or several or even as many as a dozen, and at the end of that time we know almost everything about almost nothing and almost nothing about almost everything else.

This is the price we pay for the rich rewards of specialization, but it remains that the man who can comprehend the whole of his world lives in a very small world. But even he is vastly and incurably ignorant. The knowledge that each one of us owns, even owns uniquely, cannot be summed and stored, totaled and compared. But if it could, and if it could be compared against some non-existent inventory of All That Can Be Known, what we know even as a race is insignificant.

This is not, emphatically not, a celebration of smallness. We are giants, and we are giants precisely because we labor to learn even as we labor under the weight of a nearly-infinite ignorance. That we do not know does not argue that we cannot know, quite the contrary. That we do know some of what is true argues that, in due course—day by day, step by step, grain by grain of sand—we will know more. We start from zero, as individuals and as a race, but we need not end there.

I sing the mind majestic, and there is a name for this from the Greek: philology, the love of learning. And there is another word from Greek that bears directly on what we are bearing down upon indirectly. The word is epistemology, the study of knowledge.

Epistemology teaches us how to know and how to know what we know and how to know that we know it. All absurd claims of twentieth century philosophers notwithstanding, the science of epistemology is in quite good repair. Its champions are few in number just now, but they are very sturdy, and, after all, reality is omnivalent. The modern faux philosophers make many astounding claims, but it is only the mountebank who has absolutely no intention of attempting to walk through a stone wall who will insist that he might be able to.

Epistemology teaches us how to know and philology teaches us to love doing it, but there are two questions between those two answers, one easy, one hard. The easy question is: What should we learn? That one is easy because its answer falls out from the harder one: Why should we learn?

Well, why should we?

If you are very lucky, your children will phrase this in the much easier form of, “Why do I hafta go to school?,” and you can answer it with some form of the ever-ready, “Because I said so, that’s why.” But that dodge won’t work with subtler minds. I can think of a small few motivations to learn, but all of them seem to me to be either practical but venal or noble but absurd.

Like this: It is arguable that we ought to learn—and learn to prize learning and to love it—because knowledge is the means by which we solve the problem of survival. This is true, but not terribly so. The quantity of knowledge human beings require to survive well enough to breed often enough to sustain their numbers well enough to breed again—that sum of knowledge is very small. Despite all the televised prattle about How Much We Can Learn From Other Cultures, other cultures don’t know very much, which is why we don’t hear their scholars prattling on something better than television about how little we know. Moreover, while greater knowledge in a culture can result in more creature comforts for individuals, this is a suspiciously mercenary motivation. If might goad someone into thinking up a small innovation (with the innovator immediately being slaughtered for consorting with evil spirits; that’ll teach him). But I can’t see how a desire for either survival or luxuries would move anyone toward the love of learning. Once the trail is broken by the philologers, the lovers of learning, we can expect a steady stream of tradesmen and careerists; not students, precisely, but vocationists. But survival, much less comfort, seems to me unlikely to goad the philologers to action. And here we do have something to learn from Other Cultures: No matter how hard put by the problems of survival and comfort, no culture but ours has enshrined the love of learning. Archeologists excavate gravesites and homes, temples and garbage dumps, but only in the ruined cities of The West, broadly defined, do they excavate libraries. Hoarding, treasuring, even worshipping truth—this is uniquely the invention of our culture.

Well then, why not argue that the love of learning is itself reason enough to promote the love of learning? For one thing, this noble argument is circular; it devours itself completely, leaving behind not a fin or a bone. And no parent could make this claim with a straight face; we have all tried it on our children and we have all failed. Study is hard work, and those pieces of us that we got from the apes are not easily swayed to the idea that any sort of work requires anything more than the absolute minimum effort. And, again, this is no revelation to parents. What we say, after one entreaty or fifty, is: “Because I said so, that’s why.”

Is that the answer? Why should we learn? “Because I said so, that’s why.”

This can’t be so, and yet it must be most of the time. No one who has read this far can have failed to learn to love learning, and yet each of us can only give the vaguest of answers about how that miracle happened, when and why. We all learned to love The Elephant’s Child, but it’s a long leap from the love of reading—itself something that we had to learn—to the love of learning. Reading for entertainment is not hugely different from watching television for entertainment, as much as we might like to harrumph otherwise. And reading for the conscious and conscientiously-observed purpose of improving the mind is hard work, which we are capable of avoiding even more skillfully than our children and our simian ancestors. We do it, when we do it, because we commend ourselves to the task, for commendable motives, but also because we command ourselves to it. Exactly as we command ourselves to exercise, if we do, and for the same sorts of reasons.

The why of why we learn is self-improvement, and the why of that is very near to being a problem of infinite regress. We might call our virtue Christian or we might call it Emersonian, but the true roots of the tree of knowledge are entirely Greek. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and we believe him. Millions of people have lived and died without the ability to argue Socrates’ point, without even the conceptual means to consider what might make a life worth living and how their own lives measured up. Millions more live that way now, and not just in Other Cultures. But we accept his argument by stipulation—on faith—and we don’t quibble about that word ‘worth’ even though it subsumes the same infinite regress problem as ‘self-improvement’.

The words are: “Because I said so.” Perhaps the word for why we should learn, not Greek but Latin, is egoism, the rational pursuit of one’s own true interests. What is self-improvement? The improvement of my own self, my body and my mind. What is the worth that makes my life worth living? My own worth, the values I pursue and the value I find in pursuing them. We treat it as an axiom, unquestioned and unquestionable. And since all problems of infinite regress are solved ultimately with an axiom, perhaps the Greek name of what we should study is geometry. Not geometry, precisely, but logic, the laws that govern formal systems. But there is a problem, and it’s one we run up against again and again, both because of the way logic works and because of the way our minds work. The Greeks but barely considered it, so they can’t help us solve it.

The problem is this: The universe is not a formal system.

There are truths, which can be learned but which cannot ever be doubted or disputed. Euclid’s geometry is of this type, a formal system that falls out deductively from its axioms.

There are facts, which can be observed and discovered, ordered, memorized, disputed, disproved, discarded. The example of the Black Swan, frequently used to distinguish inductive from deductive reasoning, refers to a fact that was once thought true, was true in the experience of many competent observers, but was later disproved by the discovery of new facts.

And finally there are beliefs, which cannot be learned in any meaningful sense but only accepted or rejected.

An important task of the mind, important as a matter of scrupulousness and important as a matter of survival, is to distinguish truths from facts from beliefs. As an example, Euclid’s fifth postulate, the parallel postulate, is true within the context of the formal system, but it is contrary to fact in reality: Lines in space described by photons or other masses can be warped by gravitational masses. This is how we can observe galaxies that would be hidden from us if light took its marching orders from Euclid.

And that may seem trivial, but it isn’t. Among our many legacies from the Greeks we inherit from them a way of thinking that likes formal systems. When we say “all other things being equal”, “in a perfect world”, “in principle”, “ideally”—when we say these things, we are speaking pure Greek, we are making statements about reality as though it were a formal system. And we are forevermore sifting through observational evidence looking for what we call ‘organizing principles’, ‘laws’ that will enable us to predict future observations. But while the observed behavior can and does exist, the principles and laws—the ‘models’ of the observed behavior—are creations of the human mind. They are abstract interfaces between the exterior world of real things in which we act and the interior world of formal systems in which we reason.

The statement “force equals mass times acceleration” can never be true in the way that “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of its sides” is true. The Pythagorean theorem is indisputable within the formal system of Euclidean geometry, while Newton’s second law of motion was only demonstrated to be factual by repeated—and necessarily non-exhaustive—empirical observation. It is conceivable that F=ma will be supplanted by a law of motion that is even more closely correspondent to the observed behavior of real objects. It is not conceivable that any right triangle in the imaginary Euclidean space could violate a²+b²=c². But the obverse is also true: The second law is not factual because it is a law, derived from an inherently arbitrary axiom, but because it corresponds to the observed behavior of real objects. By contrast, in real space the Pythagorean theorem is irreparably false to fact over sufficiently large distances (because, it is only fair to acknowledge, the lines are no longer all in the same plane).

Reality is not true or false, correct or incorrect. Reality simply is. Evidence is not that which corresponds to the model, a reliable model is one that corresponds to the evidence. As cloying as formal systems can be, and as useful and illuminating, a true formal system teaches us nothing that was not implied by its axioms at the outset. A model of real phenomena can be useful and instructive if it is correspondent enough to reality to permit reproducible prediction of real events. But if we operate on the model as though it were a formal system, ignoring evidence that fails to correspond to the model, we induce the most serious kind of error, epistemological error. We argue that we can know by means we know in advance to be impossible.

But there is error still more serious than this: Operating on belief as though it were a formal system. A belief cannot be proved or disproved, whether by statements about prior statements or by repeated tests against experience. A belief can be factually in error—as was the belief in geocentrism for which Galileo was persecuted—but we do not acquire beliefs by the means we use to accumulate facts and truths. Augustine defended faith in “the evidence of things not seen,” and this is a statement that can only be parsed by deliberately misdefining the word “evidence”. There is a point at which the believer defies logic and evidence and insists that he will hold his belief to their utter despite.

This is his perfect right. What he cannot do, though, is hold up his belief as anything other than a subjective state of mind. It does not originate in objective evidence. It can only be communicated vaguely, and it cannot be demonstrated to be true—or false—in any way at all.

I am an atheist; I believe there is no god. Some atheists would be more belligerent and omit the words “I believe”, but this would be cowardly in my opinion. I can make what I think are very good arguments about why the universe is not an artifact, not a made thing, but there is no statement I can make that a theologian could not call into doubt with this simple rejoinder: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This is easy, but it is also insuperable; there is no amount of physical, astrophysical or cosmological evidence I can gather that will answer that facile objection. But the contrary is also true: Massively redundant accumulated evidence of absence is a very stout argument for absence. In the end as at the beginning, belief has no argument for itself except itself.

All of this is significant, at least to me, because of the vote by the Kansas State Board of Education to expunge the study of evolution from the state curriculum guidelines.

This is not nearly as dire an outcome as you might hear it portrayed. Teaching evolution is not banned in Kansas, even though it is now essentially officially discouraged. The Christian argument of creation, such as it is, is not enshrined, although the idea of the universe as a made thing—and one of relatively recent origin at that—is implied. The actual net consequence is that the state’s new recommended curriculum, the basis of the state’s new standardized tests, will omit a dumbed-down discussion of evolution from its dumbed-down science program. Students who might have emerged from science class with a vague and useless idea of evolution will now have to suffer their insufferable ignorance in total, unsullied ignorance.

The board’s decision will have no effect on students who might be expected to graduate from high school with something resembling an actual education. The better teachers in the better schools will teach evolution, curriculum or none, state tests or none. Children being raised by educated parents will learn evolution at home, irrespective of what is or is not taught in schools. And bright students who are not lucky enough to have good teachers or wise parents can always take themselves to the library and read “On the Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man”, among many other books, on their own.

And it is certainly possible to argue that the omission of evolution is no great tragedy. We are crushed beneath the weight of our ignorance, and, try as we might, we can only hope to rid ourselves of the sparest fraction of that burden. Omitting the one in preference to the other is what we should do—when the one is cooking class and the other chemistry, for example. If evolution were to be omitted to give greater time to some more serious science—epistemology springs immediately to my mind—I would be all for it.

But this is not what will happen. Wood shop will be retained in Kansas schools. So will cooking and art appreciation and film history and phys. ed. and study hall. Not one moment of the school day’s precious wastes of time will be laid to waste. The sole consequence of the change will be that a little more time will be wasted in science class. That’s all.

Where the change is effected it will be a trivial change in an already trivialized education. Its immediate victims will suffer no immediate loss, nor will they be in any discernible way less uneducated. They will graduate from high school in a state of ignorance and the omission of this or that detail of human achievement, all of which is all but incomprehensible to them, is not a matter of great moment.

What is of great moment, I think, is this: By their action, the members of the Kansas State Board of Education ask an important question, the real question Mr. Jackson of Hutchinson left hanging in the air: Why should we not learn?

School board member Dr. Steve E. Abrams takes a stab at an answer, saying, “Evolution is not good science, and shouldn’t be taught in the schools.” This is false, of course. Evolution is good empirical science, a model of observed facts that attempts to order them in a way that permits deeper understanding and prediction of future events. Every bit of evidence collected from a vast host of sciences tends to support the idea of evolution in the large. Someday Darwin’s particular theory may be replaced, just as Ptolemy’s geocentrism was replaced by the heliocentrism of Copernicus and Galileo. But when this happens, the newer, better theory will be preferred because it answers more questions, not fewer. The Creation Science ‘argument’, to the extent that it is an argument, amounts to nothing more than caviling; the factual evidence is all against it.

But it seems unlikely that Abrams is really concerned about quality science: Among the types of ‘evolution’ to be omitted from the Kansas science curriculum are the evolutionary sequences of stars, planetary systems and galaxies. This is very good science. It bears up to the most intense scrutiny and it has produced some remarkable—and remarkably astute—predictions. Alas, astrophysics is completely incompatible with the idea of a universe created something less than 10,000 years ago. If I might put words into Abrams’ mouth, I think his objection is that science is not good theology.

That much is true, and that can provide a very useful answer to our question: Why should we not learn? “We should not learn because belief cannot demonstrate itself, and if we dare to learn we might discover something that challenges our beliefs.” This is not an uncommon attitude, more’s the pity, not even among school boards, more’s the tragedy.

It is ludicrous, of course, and it is too funny for me to leave it alone for long, but it is also abhorrent and repelling and horrifying and vile. Saying, “We choose not to urge our children to study science because they’d have more fun watching television,” is stupid and comical. But to say, “We choose to discourage our children from studying science not because we think it is false but because we fear it might be true”—that’s vicious. It is a denial of the identity of human beings as things, the only animal born capable of choosing to reason. If I believed in a god who made man in his own image and likeness, I would call the willful and spiteful rejection of reason a blasphemy, spurning and despoiling god’s greatest gift to humanity.

But Abrams has the right to do this to his own mind, he and all the other supporters of the even-more-dumbed-down dumbed-down curriculum. And the lot of them have the power to impede their own children’s access to the best information available to them. And because we have stupidly put power over education in the hands of brutes, men of unreasoning force, they have the power to try to occlude the vision of their intellectual betters in the public schools of Kansas. They will fail, of course. Truth will out. But they have the power and they’ve used it.

And they themselves are not our concern. I take great delight in tormenting baboons, but I would not cast so much as a banana before these apes. Our concern is the education of our children. The guerrillas of Kansas don’t need my help to discover a strategy to frustrate those who would frustrate discovery. But I think each one of us needs to be wary of our motives in choosing what to learn and what not to learn—what to teach and what to refrain from teaching our children.

Everything we do in the sight of our children, everything they can become aware of, teaches them something. Kansas schools may or may not teach evolution, but the Kansas State School Board has inadvertently taught the children of Kansas some very unwholesome lessons. For example:

• That politically powerful ignorance trumps rigorous study.
• That Kansas students should not be taught more and better but rather less and worse.
• That the purpose of education is not to raise thoughtful children but to baby thoughtless adults.
• That the universe is what some tyrant says it is.
• And: That the gun is mightier than the word.

These are the kinds of lessons we don’t want to teach our own children.

And the kind we do want to teach them, I think, are precisely the kind the cowardly Kansans have avoided. You need not study everything you abhor, but you must turn your attention squarely toward those things you would rather turn from. The thoughtful and honorable thing to do, if you wish to claim that evolution is not good science, is to refute it with better science. If you can, you will learn a great deal. And if you cannot, you will learn even more, including a valuable lesson on how and why to learn.

Like us, our children labor under the weight of a nearly-infinite ignorance. If we indoctrinate them, if we attempt to browbeat them into treating belief as truth, we add to their load. And even if we only indoctrinate by omission—by denying them access to the best work of the mind—we do nothing to lighten their burden of ignorance.

We are all born ignorant and we will all die that way. It’s an incurable affliction. The only treatment for it is knowledge, and the only way to acquire knowledge is by using the mind, never by refusing to. If we can teach our children how to learn, what to learn, why to learn and why they should love learning, we can teach them to treat themselves.

Can we see the world in a grain of sand? The accumulated wisdom of the Kansas State board of Education is surely smaller than that, and yet we can find the entire universe within it if we dare to look. And our children are our heavenly wild flowers. They grow or perish as the result of what we do...

The Master of Those Who Know (February 1983)

by Richard Mitchell

knowledge: Knowledge is defined as the remembering of previously learned material. This may involve the recall of a wide range of material, from specific facts to complete theories, but all that is required is the bringing to mind of the appropriate information. Knowledge represents the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain.

That intriguing definition comes from a “Pilot Curriculum” plan of “Program Gifted and Talented” in the Lakota Local School District. We don’t know where that is—the document came from a careful informant—but it doesn’t make any difference. Lakota is everywhere.

The definition is miniature rehash of a section of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, a book little known and little read, but influential beyond all measuring. It is at once the New Testament of the cult of educationism and a post-post-Hegelian plan to describe the life of the mind in such a way that educationists might suppose themselves “scientific,” and thus win at last the respect of Academe, which ordinarily dismisses them as addled appreciators not only of the Emperor’s clothing but of each of his frequent changes of clothing.

Luckily for the educationists, very few academics bothered their heads about TEO. If they had, the aspiring scientists of educationism might have suffered something more than mere disrespect. However, while the academics’ ignorance of this work is easy to understand, for the book is less fun to read than the customs regulations for the import of plucked poultry, it is less easy to forgive.

Although the Taxonomy seems to have been sort of “written” by a committee, the “credit” is usually given to its editor and principal instigator, a certain Benjamin S. Bloom. Bloom is to educationism what Aristotle is to thought, which is to say, not exactly the master of those who know, but at least, by Bloom’s own definition, the master of those who remember previously learned material.*

Even a glance here and there into Bloom’s Taxonomy would at least have prepared us, as long ago as 1956, for the otherwise unaccountable results of American schooling.

You may, for instance, have wondered how it can be that a generation of Americans seems never to have heard of anything, and knows only as much of our history as the television industry finds it profitable to show them. It may have bemused you to hear how many college students in Miami were unable to locate Miami, or the North Atlantic Ocean, for that matter, on a map. It may have been a sad surprise to discover how many Americans could neither recognize nor approve certain provisions of the Bill of Rights, and how few social studies teachers in Minnesota were able to make any statements of fact about fascism. Such things are not, as generosity, or hope, might dispose you to presume, anomalies, rare and freakish failures of a process that ordinarily produces quite different results. They are in the program.

In the pursuit of mere knowledge, “the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain,” educationists are selectively vigorous. They do give each other pretty diplomas for the sort of “research” that reveals that seventeen percent of those guidance counsellors in Buffalo who double as volleyball coaches never studied volleyball in teacher school. But where anyone not a candidate for an Ed.D. is concerned, they find knowledge less deserving of high honor, and those who would foster it less than perfect in pedagogy. “Because of the simplicity of teaching and evaluating knowledge,” says the Taxonomy, “it is frequently emphasized all out of proportion to its usefulness or its relevance for the development of the individual [p. 34].”

Well, there. You see? Who can demonstrate that the ability to locate Miami is useful or relevant to the development of the individual? And if the answer is “no one,” how shall we answer the obvious other question: Who can demonstrate that it isn’t? Who can say—who can know enough to say—that this or that particle of knowledge is not worth having?

It is not out of ignorance that we discover understanding. It is exactly because of what we already know that we can know more, that we can discern organizing principles, and make and test hypotheses, and act rationally. But all of that is not the end to which the acquisition of knowledge is intended by Bloom, et al.

That end is rather the typically slippery and empty “development of the individual.” To decide that some degree of “emphasis on knowledge” is “all out of proportion” to the “development” of millions of “individuals,” or even of one, is several steps beyond effrontery. Some might say that it borders on blasphemy. We are content to call it the hubris of invincible ignorance, which quite naturally and appropriately afflicts those who denigrate knowledge. What do they know, who know the “correct” nature of the development of the individual? Is a general and pervasive ignorance the result of some “emphasis on knowledge” small enough to be in proportion to that development?

If there is an “emphasis on knowledge all out of proportion,” to what is it out of proportion? How much time and effort should be reserved for a duly proportionate “emphasis” on whatever it is that is not knowledge?

There is a word for that which is not knowledge. It is ignorance. But Bloom and his friends must be either consummately cagey or colossally obtuse in championing ignorance.

They begin by claiming, maybe, that knowledge isn’t really knowledge in any case:

It is assumed that as the number of things known by an individual increases, his acquaintance with the world in which he lives increases. But, as has been pointed out before, we recognize the point of view that truth and knowledge are only relative and that there are no hard and fast truths which exist for all times and all places [p. 32].

Well, we recognize that point of view too. It was a hot item toward the end of sophomore year, when its titillating paradoxicality brought on neat bull sessions as to whether that statement could itself be permanently true. However, while the Bloomists seem to admit only to recognizing the sophomore’s delight, that is due not to cautious thoughtfulness, but only to imprecision of language. In fact, they subscribe to it, and derive from it a grand scheme of “education” depending on the belief that nothing can be known.

It is to support that belief that they must define knowledge only in a trivial sense. As though to prove the vanity of all learning, they point out that “punctuation is solely [that probably means “only”] a matter of convention.” We know that. And we can know its requirements and principles. The Taxonomy gladly informs us that “how we pictured the atom” has changed, which is as enlightening as the fact that Aristotle could not have located Miami either. And, most important, because this kind of assertion will lead to the Taxonomy’s true agenda, the promotion of “education” as “modification in the affective domain,” the demonstration of “what is knowable” concludes by calling to witness “the cultural aspect” of knowledge.

“What is known to one group is not necessarily known to another group, class, or culture,” Bloom tells us. As to whether that is a statement about “the knowable,” there is a test. Just read it again, putting knowable where known appears. It is to be hoped that not even Bloomists would say that there could be some knowledge accessible to Arabs but not to Jews, but that is what they say when they contrive a definition of knowledge that will permit the inclusion of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings, or any other variety of supposed knowledge. Those things, all of them “previously learned material” all too easily remembered, make up that other category, to which an “emphasis on knowledge” is “all out of proportion” for “the development of the individual.” Those are the things that the Bloomists wanted “education” to be all about. And it is.

Aristotle was partly right. Some, by nature, do desire to know; some remember previously learned material.

Freeing Jefferson’s slaves

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story by Greg Swann

“Mark Twain said, ‘In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.’” There was a smattering of uncomfortable laughter throughout the school gymnasium, accompanied by pained looks from the dais, where the school board sat. “I’m not here to talk to practiced idiots. I am here, though, to stand up for Huck Finn.”

And yes, Uncle Willie was giving a speech. Wearing a jacket and tie, no less—finest quality thrift shop haberdashery. I was shuffling through Jefferson, Oregon, shuffling my way to somewhere less moist, when that gray and soggy city was struck by the national craze to ban Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” for using the N-word.

The N-word, in case you were wondering, is “nigger”. Not “north”. Not “nitrogen”. Not even “nebulous nincompoop non-communication”. It’s “nigger”. I think it says something rather profound about the life of the mind in latter-day America that we have become used to conversing in meaningless euphemisms. “Intestinally deficient,” to say the least of it.

Anyway, you know the story; it shows up in the papers five or six times a year. Some snotty little proto-teen decided that blowing off her homework was a human rights issue, and some sleazy little ‘educator’ made a media circus out of it. It is a testament to the progress of the Politically Correct “idea” that it is now possible to be a jackass by proxy. I showed up just as the school board members, hand-crafted idiots made with pride by a skilled and practiced god, were gearing themselves up for the predictable denouement.

“And why wouldn’t I stand up for Huck?” I asked. “In some ways I am Huckleberry Finn. In some ways we all are. And, like Twain, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.’” More laughter, maybe a little better humored.

I had a copy of “Huckleberry Finn” in my hand and I was gesturing with it like a TV preacher with his bible. I said, “You can ban this book if you want to. You’ve got the power and I can’t stop you from using it. But I’d hate for you to ban it in ignorance. I’d hate for you to ban it without knowing what it is, what it really is.” I fixed the little proto-teen with a stare, pinned her with the arrows in my eyes. “I’d hate for you to ban it without knowing what it says.”

The little teenlet squirmed uncomfortably, but her troubles had just begun. Speaking directly to her, I said, “What is it that you found so offensive about this book? Does the ink smell bad to you?” A little laughter, a little more squirming. “I don’t like the color of this cover. It’s too bright to be vermilion, too dark to be russet. It looks like blood. Are you offended by books that look like blood?” There was a little more laughter, scattered and nervous, and the little girl was furious.

“You know what’s wrong with it!” she spat. “It uses the N-word!”

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. It uses the word ‘nigger’. Many times. Hundreds of times. Twain had a reason for using that word. Can you tell me what his reason was?”

She said nothing, just glared.

“Well, then, can you tell me which use of the word ‘nigger’ you found offensive? Jim is black. Is it offensive when he uses the word ‘nigger’? Huck is ignorant. Surely we can’t hold him at fault for not knowing any better than to use bad language.”

“It’s the author!”

“Indeed. Do you think Mark Twain wanted to insult black people by using the word ‘nigger’? Is that the purpose of ‘Huckleberry Finn’, to insult black people?”

She started to say something then stopped herself.

“Is that what Twain was doing with the Duke and the Dauphin? Is that what he was doing with the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, making fun of black people? Is the incident involving Colonel Sherburn intended to malign black people?”

Her face was a mask of confusion, as I knew it would be. “Do you mean to say that you are ‘offended’ by a book you haven’t even read?”

“I—, I—, I read enough of it!”

“You want to ban a book you haven’t read. You read just enough to make up an excuse to quit, didn’t you? And in preference to admitting that, you’ll make it impossible for every child in this school district to read one of the most important books ever written. Your parents must be awfully proud...”

I swept the room with my eyes. “Because this book is not intended to malign black people. The purpose of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is to malign and insult and ridicule white people, to grab them by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in the mud of their own hypocrisy. Could it be that the mud runs as thick in Jefferson as it did in Colonel Sherburn’s Arkansas?

“Huck Finn is an ignorant savage, enslaved by his nature and by his failure to rise above his nature. When he dives into the Mississippi to save Jim, that is when he becomes a human being. He is baptized, born again in the womb of the muddy river. He is America’s Moses; the water is parted by his body and the slaves are led to freedom—but the slaves are white, not black. A hundred and twenty years after independence, thirty years after emancipation, Twain commanded white America to cast off the chains of ignorance and prejudice, to practice what Thomas Jefferson so eloquently preached: that all men are created equal—black, white, brown, yellow and red. Huck Finn became a human being when he rose above his nature and his prejudices and his avarice and his appetites and his passions and his fears. He became a human being when he resolved to stand for justice no matter what the cost.”

I turned my gaze to the school board. “What do you stand for...?”

I spun back to the audience and walked my eyes from face to face. “This is what teachers do. I have no idea what ‘educators’ do. Gobble up tax dollars and quack like ducks, I guess.” Pleasant laughter. “Screech like chickens when you call ’em on it.” More laughter. “But this is what teachers do. They grab you by the scruff of the neck and say, ‘Un-ac-ceptable. Your appetites are not proof. Your passions are not proof. Your craven prejudices are the perfect opposite of proof. Your precious feelings demonstrate nothing, justify nothing, prove nothing.’”

I looked back to the proto-teen. “If you had been lucky enough to have a teacher, instead of this collection of god-mangled idiots, you would have read ‘Huckleberry Finn’ by now. You could have moved on to ‘Lord of the Flies’, which is about school boards.” That joke was pushing things, I know; irony is the hardest of mettles. “If you were lucky enough to have a teacher, you could get yourself an education.”

I swept my eyes across the room again. “We were all of us born ignorant, just like Huck. Born naked and squalling, covered in blood and mucous and bilious excrement. We are born as animals, savage and helpless and terrified and outraged and completely incompetent to do anything about it. And thus would we remain, until we died, minutes or hours later. Except that each of us was lucky enough to have a teacher—a lot of teachers—when we were young. They taught us to feed ourselves and to walk and to speak and to use the bathroom—a thousand and one things that toddlers do routinely and animals do only in performance.

“But education doesn’t stop when we’re toddlers; that’s when it begins! And that’s when we hand the reins over to the ‘educators’, the ‘professionals’. And they take children enslaved by their ignorance and lead them to the charnel house of tedium, teaching them nothing and leaving them no outlets for their energy but self-destruction. Is this what you went to all that trouble for, so your children could grow up to be book banners, book burners, self-righteous champions of eternal savagery?

“The job of a teacher is to lead children—and adults—out of the slavery of ignorance. If you had been lucky enough to have a teacher, you’d know that. The job of a teacher is to induce you to rise above your appetites and your passions and your prejudices and your fears and your feelings and to impel you to use your mind. For an instant. For an hour. For a day. For a year. For a lifetime. The job of a teacher is to teach you to conquer your fears and your prejudices and your aversions, to say to them proudly, ‘You will not enslave me, for my mind can master anything!’

“The job of a teacher is to command you to rise above the mud and excrement that is your inheritance from nature and grasp instead the legacy left you by all those great minds who lived before you.”

I pointed my finger right at the little proto-teen and said, “You are made of the same stuff as Socrates. The same stuff as Michelangelo, Copernicus, Beethoven, Shakespeare. You walk the same green Earth that Twain himself walked. You read his books—or refuse to—by the light of the same sun. There is nothing you cannot reach—if you find the right teacher.

“And the job of that teacher is to lead you out of the slavery of darkness and into the freedom of the clean, clear light of knowledge, of wisdom, of reason. To be the Moses of your mind’s liberation and help you build Jerusalem right here, in Jefferson’s gray and soggy land.”

I held my copy of “Huckleberry Finn” aloft—like a bible, like a sword, like a torch. “I don’t know how many teachers you have among all these ‘educators’. But I know this: this book is one of the finest teachers you will ever have. If you ban it, you will condemn yourselves to wallow in the mud. And you will belong there.”

The echo of my voice died to silence and the silence hung heavy in the air. I had begun to wonder if I was going to get a free ride out of town on a rail. But then a big, beefy man at the back of the gym stood up and clapped his hands together hard. He applauded with a slow cadence and, one by one, all around the room, people stood up and joined him. Surprised me, really. I figure there’s always one or two folks who are willing to listen to what I have to say, but not very many. It wasn’t everyone, even so; a stout minority of ‘educators’ and school board members sat scowling, their arms crossed, their lips pursed in tight little lines. But the parents and the real teachers rose, one at a time, applauding not Twain nor my frail defense of him, but their own love for justice and their will to grasp it.

And then, surprise of all surprises, the little proto-teen stood up and started to clap. I’d like to hope she was a little wiser for spending an hour with the muses. More probably she was mooing with the herd, not knowing that for once this group of people was not a herd. At the very least, she was chastened and chagrined. And after all, victory is where you find it. I tossed my copy of “Huckleberry Finn” to her, lofting it over the crowd. She caught it with one hand and held it high—like a bible, like a sword, like a torch.

Huckleberry Finn jumped in the river to free a runaway slave. And he’s freeing slaves still, in Jefferson and everywhere people seek deliverance from the bondage of ignorance. Huck became a human being when he resolved to stand for justice no matter what the cost. We become more perfectly human when we do the same.

Find out more...

Christ on a double-helix! You can explore creation science with The Creation Science Association for Mid-America. The contrary point of view is argued by The National Center for Science in Education. The first of many lawsuits over the Kansas state school board’s decision to omit discussion of evolution from the public school curriculum will be brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Richard Mitchell’s entire corpus is available on the internet. His books are free on-line, but nonetheless they demand a high payment: You must pay attention. You can find them at: http://members.aol.com/hu4wahz/ug/index.html. Much better news, Mitchell’s books are coming back into print. The Gift of Fire, his finest work, is available in a hand-bound collector’s edition from Bob Shubert. And Less Than Words Can Say, has just been re-issued by The Akadine Press. They plan to publish more of Mitchell’s books in the coming months.

For emphasis: Please feel free to propagate Freeing Jefferson’s slaves in any way you can think of, in any medium, as many times as you want. I would love it if you were to print it and hand out copies at your next school board meeting. At any rate, I hope you will avail yourself of it when the book banners come around for Twain or Golding or Shakespeare—when they come around for your children. I can think of no better use for my life than to set my shoulder beside yours to push back the darkness of savagery; I will be honored to help in the small way I can. —GSS