Why Education Is Useless

Introduction: Why Education Is Useless

INTRODUCTION Why Education Is Useless Intellectual rhymes with ineffectual, and rightly so, many would say. The uselessness of education is a perdurable theme in Western cultural history -one so influential, in fact, that any respect we might have for highly educated people is likely to retreat before our suspicion of them. Tradition encourages us to think that those who are book smart are lacking in street smarts. We are inclined to believe that even if their hearts are in the right place (a dubious proposition to begin with), their heads are in the clouds. We entertain this suspicion even if we have never heard of Aristophanes and of the work that he titled The Clouds. Regardless, in our complaints about educators today we still echo this ancient Greek playwright's mockery of Socrates, that "high priest of windy words."1 The immemorial theme of the uselessness of education is so pervasive that we find it voiced by the most disparate people imaginable. A Chinese emperor of the third century B.C., Qin Shi Huang, is said to have buried intellectuals alive; and as we can learn from Richard Hofstadter's classic study, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life(1963), the impulse certainly did not die with him. "It is evident that to read too many books is harmful," said Mao Tse-Tung; as many reporters found cause to remark during the 2000 presidential campaign in the United States, George W Bush seems to be of much the same opinion.2 Of course, Bush pays lip service to the importance of education; and despite the popular sport oftaking potshots at "sissy-britches intellectual morons," as George Wallace characterized persons such as myself, people rarely damn education absolutely and completely.3 1n the words ofDerek Bok, the former president of Harvard, "Disputing the importance of education may seem comparable to criticizing motherhood and family."4 Nonetheless, the idea that education is useless goes well beyond our occasional jabs at windbags, intellectuals, and pompous poseurs. Like a haunting spirit, this theme is liable to materialize in all our social relations , cultural forms, activities, and aspirations, threatening to set them at naught. INTRODUCTION So why is education useless? • Education is useless because it destroys our common sense. As Michel de Montaigne suggested in the late sixteenth century, paraphrasing the apostle Paul, "The man who presumes to know no longer knows what it is to know." Or as he commented in an essay on Virgil, "The sciences treat things too subtly, in a way that is too artificial and different from what is usual and natural." The effect of schooling, he said, quoting Seneca, is to transform "simple virtue" into "an obscure and subtle science."5 We turn to common sense for relief, as Cornelius Agrippa commented in the following century: "Thus, I say, sometimes the simple and rude Idiot sees those things oft-times, which a School-Doctor, blinded with the Traditions ofmen, cannot perceive."6 Forrest Gump could not have put it better. It is just astonishing how stupid education can make people: in the words of Cicero, written thousands of years before George Wallace inveighed against pointyheaded intellectuals, "Somehow or other no statement is too absurd for some philosophers to make:'7 • Education is useless because it leads us away from practicality. "Our people have no need ofdiplomas to improve their country gloriously," said the Khmer Rouge; and though their methods were hideously extreme, their sentiments on this subject reflect an ages-old conviction that schooling makes people less able to cope with everyday life.8 Ventriloquizing popular suspicions of philosophers, Erasmus wrote, "Though they know nothing at all, they profess to know everything; and though they do not know themselves, and sometimes can't see a ditch or a stone in their path (either because most of them are bleareyed or because their minds are wool-gathering), nevertheless they claim they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matter, quiddities, ecceities-things so fine-spun that no one, however 'eagleeyed ,' would be able, I think, to perceive them."9 Robert Burton contended that the most successful pupils are usually "silly, soft fellows in their outward behaviour, absurd, ridiculous to others, and no whit experienced in worldly business."10 Even a revered latter-day humanist such as Lionel Trilling, as remembered by Lennard Davis, was liable to "feel silly being a grown man studying literature, wasting his time with words."11 The belief in "knowledge for its own sake" that one finds in...