A Rant against Conservatives. Part I

Yesterday a guy was here to do some painting for me. This guy is very chatty, so we got to talking—or maybe arguing.

This guy is a typical conservative. His wife came up from a background of poverty, so he has no sympathy for anyone who lives in poverty; says they don't want to work.

And maybe this guy is a little more extreme than some conservatives. He seems to feel he shouldn't have to pay any taxes at all.

But like a lot of conservatives, when he argues, a lot of his facts are wrong. (I believe that these guys know that the arguments they use are incorrect. Conservative in the public eye, like politicians, do that, and this guy showed that he was doing it, too.)** He said that the property tax that he pays goes to our governor. I got out my property tax bill, and not one single item on there has anything to do with state government. It's all local and county: village, township, county, school districts, this district and that district. But nothing at all that said "Illinois."

These people are so accustomed to hearing, and parroting, common canards of the Right. They have no concern for what is or is not true.

He said he has no formal education, and that's uttered as a boast. Presumably education is a bad thing. I'm reminded of the days when I was a college teacher in a college town, in an otherwise rural area. When I had my haircut I'd hear the attitudes of the "townies" toward the university. We were faggots and commies who were there to subvert their wholesome, corn-fed offspring. They called us the "fuckalty."

And my painter reminds me of my father, who didn't know what he didn't know. Or maybe my grandfather. My grandfather always boasted about being a self-educated man. One day he gave me a problem to solve. I asked for pencil and paper, and in probably less than a minute, I had the answer for him. He was amazed. It was basically a rather simple problem in high-school algebra. But he didn't even know that there was such a tool. See, an example of not knowing what you don't know.

What does education do for people? Ideally, rather than just imparting facts, it also teaches critical thinking and has an influence on attitudes.*

And why do these conservative types, like my painter, glory in being uneducated, scoff at education and the educated? Maybe it's because they secretly know that education would disabuse them of a lot of their currently-held, incorrect ideas.
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*Update. On the subject of what a nontechnical education can do for you--a favorite subject of mine, see this link: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/05/26/oh-the-humanities-why-not-to-pick-a-college-major-based-on-a-s/

**Update (October 14, 2011). An example of how conservatives lie: This is from an article on Huff Post Politics:

A federal judge ruled in August that the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List had to stop making the claim on its website that "Obamacare" subsidizes abortions because the assertion is false.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

What Does a Self-Educated Person Know?

I just read a very interesting article in Smithsonian magazine (Oct. 2009 issue). The title is "A World Too New," and the author is Edmund S. Morgan, an emeritus professor of History at Yale. The article has to do with the knowledge and expectations that Columbus had for "the Indies," which affected the outcome of Europeans' early contacts with Western Hemisphere natives.

The entirely of the article is very interesting, but there were two very subordinate thoughts of Morgan's that struck me as very provocative.

First, he says that, before setting out for "the Indies" (the east coast of Asia, as, you recall, Columbus expected to reach), Columbus

was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. . . . Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

I truly applaud this observation of Morgan's, about the self-educated person. My experience includes encountering several people who precisely fit that picture. Such people know a lot, but often not as much as they think they do; and, more important, a lot of what they "know" is wrong.

I wish I could identify exactly where the pitfalls of self-education lie. Maybe this—from my own experience—will help shed a little light.

At one point, for the sake of the work I was doing in my job, I decided I ought to have a little more knowledge of organic chemistry. So I got my hands on a college organic chemistry textbook.

Well, the problem was that the organic chemistry course in college usually assumes you've taken a prerequisite course, perhaps inorganic chemistry. And I had not had that course. I had had a high-school chemistry course, and no college chemistry at all. Therefore, I was at a disadvantage in trying to learn organic chemistry. I did not have the background knowledge that the book assumed, I lacked what I needed to make what the book had to say meaningful.

Not that I could gain nothing from the book. The real lesson is, if you don't have a systematic education in a field or subject, if you have bits of knowledge acquired piecemeal, you are going to have some gaps in what you know and understand, and maybe, like the self-taught people I've known, you get some wrong impressions. Imperfect or inadequate understandings are sometimes no better than a lack of understanding. At least in the latter case you may realize that you don't know something, rather than believing you understand the matter when in fact you have incorrect ideas.

Further thoughts inspired by Morgan's article in the next posting.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein