‘Ignorance Is No Bliss’

Pursuant to your editorial, I am getting extremely tired of reading how stupid our students are and then reading the totally inane, useless questions they are asked to prove the point. I am 66 years old, which means I was raised in the old school where we, theoretically at least, got an education. I have an I.Q. in the genius class, have seven years of college, was reading high school literature in the third grade and can’t answer half of the questions.

Yes, I learned about the Magna Carta when I was in school but not once in 50 years have I needed that information. Of further dubious value is the knowledge of who was President during a war. The only value I can see to history (aside from keeping a lot of history teachers busy) is to learn from our mistakes, or at least, to use past experience to do a better job in the present. The human animal does not do that, never has and that leads you to believe he never will. If you are a computer programmer why do you need to know who T.S. Eliot was, much less anything he wrote?

What scares me more than the ignorance of our students is the ignorance of our educators. What they don’t seem to realize is that since information goes up exponentially like anything else, there are probably a hundred more things to learn now than there was when I was a child. In spite of the brain’s infinite capacity there isn’t time to learn everything.

We have gone through the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and are now in what is being called the computer revolution. We keep blaming the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy on all kinds of things like government policies, exploitation of the poor or greed by the “haves,” etc. The truth is that unless you acquire the education to keep up in an ever-increasing technical world, you will end up a button pusher much like in Orwell’s “1984.”

Educators like to talk in terms of a “well-rounded” education. I am not sure just what value that has in the real world but something has to give. I would much rather have my children learn about computers than Magna Cartas.

JOHN WAUGEN

Anaheim