We go to school to learn. Schools for everyone were invented in America, the elementary school about 200 years ago and the secondary school about 100 years ago. In many parts of the world, getting any schooling at all is a chancy thing if you are poor. The elementary school was to teach the basic elements of reading, writing and arithmetic. It is still not entirely clear what the secondary school should teach. For a long time, many nations tried to sort the children into those with brains enough for a full education and those best off hoeing in the fields. We are now in a time when hoes are used less and less and every citizen is most valuable with a good base of wide knowledge.
It is best if schools teach what is true but our knowledge of truth is always changing. Adults have a rough time keeping up with the latest studies which seem to contradict other recent studies rather often. New ideas emerge all the time. This is a time when we are all familiar with a new way of doing something emerging and suddenly making obsolete what was recently thought to be standard. Think of film-less digital cameras more or less supplanting film cameras or MP3 players and files substituting for records or even CD’s.
I am fascinated by cases where the knowledge of the day impeded thought or worse. The story of Semmelweis, the physician who found that washing physicians’ hands saved lives of women giving birth shows that arrogance combined with ignorance can be very difficult to overcome. The 1939 book The Saber Tooth Curriculum emphasizes the investment that society makes in instruction and the difficulties of modifying that instruction even when all the saber tooth tigers have died.
There is a video by Joel Barker called The Business of the Future that shows three examples of new, superior, cheaper technology being ignored or shut out by entrenched methods and ideas that did not want to be displaced: Xerox machines, quartz watch movements and changes in auto or golf-cart type vehicle design. Garrison Keillor’s blog today tells the story of Koichi Tanaka, born in 1959, the only man to win a Nobel Prize in a science without a post-bachelor’s degree. You can read the story of how his ignorance of chemistry helped him solve an important chemistry problem.
