Last Monday evening, I found myself discussing The Return of Martin Guerre, the history of a trial which took place in rural 16th-century France, to a friend of mine. As I began to explain the book’s premise, and why I was writing a paper about it, my friend, who happens to be in the College of Engineering, asked me with complete and utter candor whether a justice system already existed in Europe in the 1560s. Without showing my surprise, I responded that there was, adding that it took many of its precedents from Roman Law.[*] My friend is intelligent, hard-working, and bilingual, and the fact that he was not even aware that Renaissance France had a system of courts, judges, and parlements is merely the most recent example I have encountered of the low standards of historical education in our society. History is the most-disliked subject among High School students, and is particularly unpopular among racial minorities, and I do not know whether our culture dislikes history because of the way it is taught, or whether it is taught inadequately because we consider it not worth teaching well.
Although as a history major and potential historian or history teacher, I take historical ignorance somewhat more seriously than the rest of you might, historical ignorance among the well-educated is, I think, one particular manifestation of a more general problem in our education system. I am referring to ignorance of fields outside of our own specialty, whatever it may be. Education is meant to broaden one’s minds and one’s horizons, and make one aware of the larger world: education ought not to sharpen the mind by narrowing it.
Before I continue, I would first like to combat three antithetical myths. The first is that of a division between the natural sciences and the humanities. Most of us have heard this before, and most of you probably disagree with it at some level: according to this theory, one’s mind is either suited to math-and-sciences, or to the humanities. One will receive a 760 on the Math section of the SAT, and a 590 on the Critical Reading section because one is, in a sense, fated to do so. This theory is even supported by the quasi-scientific explanation of the division of the left and right sides of the brain (by which people really mean the telencephalon), one associated with quantitative reasoning, and the other with creative tasks. Somehow, the existence of these two halves means that one must be superior to the other, and that therefore, one side, and therefore one talent, predominates. Although I do not wish to dispute laterization of brain functions,[†] this fact should no more lead to the supposition that one is only capable of using one or the other side, any more than the fact that one of one’s shoes fits better than the other should lead one to conclude that one should wear only one shoe at a time. We all have special talents (or maybe not), this should not preclude our seeking to learn a relatively more difficult subject.
The second myth, again brought up by a friend of mine the other day, who was praising 19th-century (and earlier) methods of Jewish education, in which the same teachers taught all subjects to a group of students, from physics to Tanakh, and from astronomy to Talmud. He seemed to think that the existence of specialty teachers is due to the lack of recognition that all laws, whether Halachic or physical, derive from the same source. Disregarding the theological origin of this statement, what he didn’t seem to realize was that until the early years of the 20th century,[‡] a single learned person could reasonably hold most scientific knowledge in his head. This is even more so before works of such physicists as Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries. Before this, those with sufficient intelligence and leisure time could fit all scientific knowledge inside of their heads, with room to spare: living in the 12th century, the Rambam learned his physics by reading Aristotle and the classical commentators. He found that Yechezkel’s divine vision squared remarkably well with the world of Aristotle. This myth is even more spurious than the first: in order to fully understand a field of science, one must work in a well-equipped laboratory: in order to fully understand a field of history, one must read all relevant secondary-source literature, and spend extensive time in archives. It is difficult to even be a specialist in history-in-general, specifically, because one cannot remain on top of the vast amount of research in every field, and follow the shifting historiographic river of claim, counter-claim, and compromise.
Because all fields, from astrophysics to the classics, are all changing so much so quickly all the time, we can no longer understand just what it is that Stephen Hawking studies, or just what makes M theory so trippy. This can sometimes lead to a feeling of intellectual helplessness, which brings me to the third myth: that nobody can ever really understand anything, and therefore shouldn’t try. In Travels with Charlie, a Yankee farmer complains to John Steinbeck that “My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard. I don’t even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that made a rock or a table. I don’t even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We’ve got nothing to go on — got no way to think about things.” In other words, because most of us can’t tell a charmed blue quark from a Higgs boson, or wrap our heads around the Mandelbrot set, or explain oxidative phosphorylation to a small child, we should never open up a book on science. This is patently false and quietist approach: as the logic goes, because we cannot know everything, we cannot know anything.
This is not a purely academic discussion. Ignorance of the basic facts of life has real-world consequences. Sallie Tisdale, describing her work as nurse in an abortion clinic, recounts a dialogue with a patient, which is simply one example of the damage caused by the ignorance of one’s own body:
“When’s the baby going to go up into my stomach?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when women get so big, isn’t the baby in your stomach? Doesn’t it hatch out of an egg there?”
This is an egregious example of misinformation, but regardless of your position in the abortion debate, I think that you can probably agree that this patient would not have found herself in such a quandary (medical or ethical, take your pick), had she known more about human reproduction.
Leaving you on that note, this blog post is turning out to be longer than I had expected. When I get to part II, I will go on to flesh out my argument, explaining why even academics should learn subject matter from other fields, and how, within the Cornell community, we can make it easier for them.
~JD
“Overnight, foreign lenders’ confidence collapsed and economic policy floundered in internal bickering. The International Monetary Fund imposed draconian conditions in return for new loans, while overseas creditors demanded that the regime guarantee the entire private foreign debt of the companies that had been taken over — about $7.7 billion — or risk jeopardizing their agreements for new loans. The desperate officials had no choice but to sign, thus fully protecting foreign banks while passing the burden on to domestic taxpayers. During the boom, Chile’s economic gains had been privatized; now, in the crunch, the country’s losses were socialized” (Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, 197).
[*] In fact, many Americans might be surprised to know that the justice system in most of the American states more closely resembles the legal code of the French Ancien Regime, which shares common roots with the English Common Law introduced in the thirteen original American colonies, than it does contemporary French Law, based upon the Napoleonic Code formulated in the early 19th century. Not to say there are not major differences, such as the existence in modern American trials of a jury of peers, and the ban on torture. If you’re interested on experiencing firsthand the differences between the Common Law and the Napoleonic Code, commit a crime first in New York, and when you’re finished doing time, drive to Louisiana and commit the same crime there.
[†] The two hemispheres are, in fact, quite good at compensating the one for the other, provided that damage occurs earlier in one’s life rather than later. A 19th-century autopsy once revealed that a normal, functioning human being had apparently lived his whole life with only one hemisphere.
[‡] The real turning point occurred in the years 1923-1924, when physicists finally ditched the old Newtonian model of the universe, having realized that the fact that energy came in tiny packets known as “quanta” threw much of what they thought they knew about the universe to the winds.
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