Educated?

Recently I had a rather eye opening revelation. A good friend and I were talking, and I discovered a truly remarkable state of affairs: He wasn’t educated!

Now mind you, the young man has an AA degree. And he was, in fact, a straight A student, both in college and in high school. But, he wasn’t educated. What do I mean by that then? Hearken.

It happened that he was wondering who the picture of the man on the 10 dollar bill was. He didn’t know, and I found that mildly surprising, maybe even a tad troubling. Now, one is not likely to be fired from his or her job for not knowing that little bit of trivia, but why would one not know it? Being curious, I asked a few questions of my own.

Who is the current Vice President of the United States? He didn’t know. I wasn’t worried; maybe he was a Republican. He’d certainly know the answer to the next question.

What’s the definition of sine and cosine in math? He was ignorant of those molecules of knowledge too. Okay, so let’s try English. Let me have one use of the semicolon when writing. He thought I was referring to part of the gastro-intestinal tract, though he didn’t use that terminology. At this point I am about to recommend some serious reading for him.

In science one of the most common terms of the day—seen and heard on TV all of the time—is DNA: to what do the initials in the acronym DNA refer? He thought they were initials for did-not-answer! By now I’m worried. This young man definitely needs to read more. But, I’m not done; I still have hope.

“You play the guitar, right, John?”

“Sure Mr. Smith. I play it good,” he said.

“Well,” I retorted.

“Well what?” he asked.

“Never mind. Let me ask you, who wrote the Brandenburg concertos?” I said.

“Never read it,” he said.

“Can you tell me what century Bach lived in?’ I said.

“Back where,” he said. Yes, I’m certain of it now. John needs to put up a futon in the library because he ain’t gonna be leavin’ there for a long time!

Frustrated but tenacious (tenacity is my strongest suit), I plugged on. “John do you know anything about the Civil War?” I said.

“Yeah, Mr. Smith, I do. It’s about these married couples and all of their troubles. I saw the last episode; the wife was cheatin’ on her husband!” he said. I was speechless and more than a little troubled. I liked this young man, and he wasn’t doing well. Yes, absolutely, a futon in the library and a tattoo on his forehead “Reading isn’t the most important thing; it’s the only thing!”

Gathering myself, I asked him what he had been learning in school to get all of those A’s. He told me that he was an expert at video games. He is flashing fast with the game-joystick of his PlayStation. And, he knew what put-and-calls were (look it up): it’s when you put all of your game stuff away when your mom calls you for dinner.

Folks we are creating a generation of technicians, and we’ve got to stop it. It’s time we took a good look at liberal arts education and begin force feeding it to our young people. It is not enough to be able to turn on a computer and manipulate a joystick with gunfighter speed and ferocity. To be truly educated one actually needs to know something and be able to think at a critical level. It’s part of being civilized, for goodness sakes!

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