The Shallow Education of America

Last updated on: July 29, 2015 at 6:26 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Shallow Education of America 2015-07-29T18:26:02-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Christians want all God’s children to get the gift of literacy.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. So I was told in my childhood by the television. I believed it then, and I believe it now. Some waste their minds on purpose, some have waste thrust upon them, and some waste a mind after a good start.

For the fool, the man who wastes a good mind for no good reason, the Book of Proverbs has many concise lessons. For the victim of educational abuse, a Christian stands in solidarity. We have spread literacy to the captives wherever we go. The shallow person, the half-educated, is a harder challenge. He may be well read in his field, occupational literacy, but forget how to handle texts in genres outside his job. Pity the person who is at a graduate level of complexity in thought at work, but thinks like a tenth grader when it comes to culture.

Occupational literacy can be very high while cultural literacy is low. This happens when the medical doctor, capable of breaking down the anatomy into parts that Renaissance science did not know existed, cannot understand a Shakespeare play. An engineer who can read technical journals that would delight the soul of Scotty on the Enterprise cannot compose a sonnet for a party. The theater critic does not understand even the first elements of the scientific method and so falls for the most foolish vaccination conspiracy theories. Too often, Americans surpass every generation in literacy related to their jobs but cannot grasp, at an equal level, the wisdom of their ancestors. We are trained, but not educated when this happens.

This is not to say there once was a golden age and we have fallen from that blessed time. In the American past, more people were totally illiterate and many Americans were kept that way on purpose by tyrants. Many other Americans were semi-literate: able to read basic things like the paper, but not really capable of grasping advanced writing in any area. What is different is that we have more brilliant semi-literates: people able to read highly technical articles, but unable to get beyond “hot or not” when it comes to explaining love.

They do their jobs at a grad school level, but only have a high school vocabulary and linguistic apparatus to explain life. Fifty year old problems require precise language, complex arguments, and subtlety that cannot be squeezed into a tenth grade worldview. The semi-literate is also cursed with a fatal sense of superiority. He or she is well paid and highly regarded in his or her community. The semi-literate is dazzling from 9-5 and so assumes his witlessness at the Opera is a failure of the Opera.

This would all be amusing if it did not lead to failure in so many areas of life. The man who should woo his wife in new and different ways is still fumbling with concepts stale after his senior year of college. The woman who should be able to explain her feelings in a more sophisticated way is still squeezing them into speech patterns out of date by the time she was twenty-five. We are so articulate at work, but grunt our way through problems at home.

For this reason, most of us have to keep reading hard books. We must strive to stretch our minds in our choices of entertainment. Thankfully, doing this (like any exercise) might start with pain, but ends in great pleasure.

Besides: a mind is a terrible thing to half-waste.

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