A guest post from Julie Krauss over at Individual Sovereignty
Back in the late 60’s or early 70’s (when else!), there was a wonderful new theory of education that had been developed and was being taught to high-school (talk about child abuse! and I’m not kidding) and college students all over America. And it went like this.
“You don’t have to know It; you just have to know how to look it up.”
So there is no need for background knowledge, knowledge of context, knowledge of What Went Before, knowledge of cause and effect either in reality or in theory…? How thoughtless, uninformed, and downright stupid is that! Every “It,” every fact you know becomes part of your background knowledge, like a partly-put-together jigsaw puzzle that helps you put the next It, or Fact, into its proper place in the whole. If you cannot do that…you will never have a picture of anything with enough of it put together in your mind, grasped, UNDERSTOOD, well enough to work from.
And the “educators” taught this claptrap, and the students lapped it up and repeated it to each other with great seriousness and greater glee.
Yes, what-we-think-we-know is changing at lightning speed these days and that’s very frustrating. But you can’t stop looking for the Facts and using them to improve the Picture just because it’s difficult and frustrating!
Anyway, any educator who touted that malarkey Back in the Day should be tarred and feathered, drawn & quartered, run out of town on a rail, and dropped into boiling oil. Talk about malfeasance!
And it’s no wonder so many people don’t know the difference between George Washington and Bugs Bunny. They don’t have to. All they have to do is Look Him Up. The Revolutionary War? The War for Independence? Wasn’t that some sort of war between Canada and Mexico or something?
On the one side, I do this all the time. My tub diverter was hosed, and I looked up how they worked on eHow, got the parts at Home Depot, and away I went. There is no end to the usefulness of just grabbing stuff off the internet…..
But it has an extremely frightening side, as well.
If you have no memory of your own, if you have no tracks to show how your opinion went from A to B, how can you tell if you’re being lied-to? Manipulated?
What about when stuff you thought you “knew” disappears? Or is modified? How can you hold politicians accountable for representations you may no longer access? How long before people just vanish inexplicably?
It’s one thing if some plumbing widget disappears down the Memory Hole, but if you can’t compare the Bush-era’s “deficits are incompetence” Obama with the current “deficits don’t matter” Obama, being a citizen loses meaning.