The common aphorism notwithstanding, ignorance is not bliss. True, if your beloved is unfaithful, the longer you remain in the dark about it then the longer you may remain in a state of emotional satisfaction, “blissfully unaware” as they say. But when the infidelity is discovered, typically one laments that blissful period with a cry of, “How could I have been so stupid?”
Yet stupidity isn’t usually the problem—it’s ignorance—in this case, ignorance of what the “signs of infidelity” meant. And it’s easy to be ignorant. It can go undiscovered until, like an upthrusted-section of sidewalk, you discover it as you’re falling on your face.
No fan of ignorance myself, I’ve found that it isn’t easy to even know what you’re ignorant about, let alone ascertain the subtle gradations of that ignorance. So when I get a unique opportunity to become a little less ignorant about something, I take it. This happened recently on a flight home from California.
It was just after Valentine’s Day this year, during the stretch of bad weather that struck the upper Midwest and East Coast at that time. Though my flight from LAX to Chicago had been delayed by several hours, my connection to Grand Rapids had also been delayed. I was pleased that I’d still made it in time. When I finally boarded my flight, it turned out that it would still be quite some time before it was able to take off—traffic was severely backed up. Realizing that all I thought I knew about air traffic control had come from TV and movies, I took advantage of the headsets supplied by the airline and listened in on channel nine to the radio chatter between the tower and the planes.
If you want to witness air transportation professionals earning their pay, the time to do it is during stormy weather at one of the world’s busiest airports. Particularly when everyone is itching to get out and ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere until the weather clears up (even if that weather is a thousand miles away). To my weary ears, it sounded something like this: “8247, pull up to Zebra 21. UA-349, roll out of Charlie Five. 1256, pull up to the pad short of Tango 12, and wait until you hear back from me.” “Tower, what’s the latest on the weather in Boston?” “Thunderstorms.” “Detroit?” “Freezing rain. 821, hold there until the Jumbo rolls past, then cross the bridge.” This kind of talk, rapid-fire every word of it, went on for hours.
While I was using the headphones, my fellow passengers were getting more and more impatient. The guy next to me said, “There is no reason for us to have to wait this long!” “Yeah!” someone seconded.
But I knew better. Sure there’s a reason. There are twenty planes in front of us. Some of them are going to have bad weather move in at their destination before they get up to the runway. We can’t just roll over them.
Being “in the loop” via the headset made me much more patient than I would have been otherwise. Had I not put on the headphones, I would have been bitching like the other passengers. But I was appalled by the depth of my prior ignorance about what the conditions were like for the pilots and the tower crew. Despite having flown across the country many times, as familiar as I’d thought I’d become with airplanes and airports, I’d had no grasp of what the people in charge of getting me safely from here to there have to deal with.
In the end, the freezing rain moved out of Grand Rapids and the flight home was essentially uneventful. The bitching came to an end, replaced by cheering when we landed. Those cheering the loudest were still blissfully unaware of the details of quite why it was we landed six hours late.
I’m depressed.
I told you the plane story so I could discuss the discouraging nature of a particular brand of ignorance that currently infects the USA. I bring it up here in Analog because you guys appreciate the value of being prepared for the future. But the USA is a country that is not at all ready for the future, nor preparing for it.
It isn’t just a matter of ignorance. As I illustrated above, any intelligent person is aware that there is a lot of which he’s ignorant. And there have always been, and always will be, people way too ignorant for their own, or anyone else’s, good.
But what happens when ignorance becomes acceptable?
I’m not talking about this in the simple, self-esteem enhancing way. “There, there, Johnny, it’s okay even if you can’t find the Pacific Ocean on the globe.” The problem is that ignorance is becoming acceptable out of a general ignorance of what constitutes ignorance. What is just as bad, the primary tool for eradicating ignorance, that being literacy, is also on the decline.
My depression started last December. My local paper, The Grand Rapids Press, reprinted an article from the Baltimore Sun about the results of a recent literacy study done in the US. The opening sentence reads, “More Americans are getting college degrees than a decade ago, but skills in reading and analyzing data among the well educated have dropped significantly . . .” Accompanying the article is a graph showing that only 13% of Americans are at a “proficient” prose literacy level. Unfortunately, all proficient means in this context is that they can do “complex activities such as comparing viewpoints in two different editorials.” It doesn’t say whether or not they can also contrast and evaluate those editorials.
Yet 100% of those people get to vote (not, fortunately, that they all will).
A piece by Ben Feller, education writer for the AP, in a web article from January 19, 2006, discussed the same study. He pointed out that, “The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.” Most dispiriting to me, however, is this: “The survey examined college and university students nearing the end of their degree programs. The students did the worst on matters involving math, according to the study.”
This doesn’t upset me because they did poorly in math—I used to teach math and I expect those skills to be at the bottom. The upset came with another Ben Feller piece that appeared in the Press on February 19, 2006. The title was “What Crisis? Parents, pupils content with math, science.” These two quotes pretty well sum up the article: “(B)oth topics are important, but ‘most parents are saying you’re better off going to school for something there’s a big need for.’” Also: “Nationwide, a new poll shows, most parents are content with the science and math education their children get—a starkly different view than that held by national leaders.” Along with the article was a sidebar (attributed to “Public Agenda”) in which surveys show: “Most parents believe their children are taking enough math and science, while 45 percent of students feel a career in these subjects would make them unhappy.”
In other words, despite the critical need for better math and science education, parents disagree. They agree that math and science are important, but think their kids are better off pursuing “something there’s a big need for.” Don’t they get it? The reason there is a concern about inadequate math/science education is because there is a “big need for” people proficient in those subjects. Despite the current state of national despair over low math ability, parents say the problem isn’t in their district—their kids take enough math and science. (Right. And a survey of my fellow passengers would have concluded there was no reason the plane couldn’t take off.)
Alarmed and disheartened as I was by these articles, what finally spurred me to write this one was an opinion piece by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writers group. It appeared in the February 18 issue of the Press under the title, “Life Without Algebra.” Therein, Cohen tells us of the plight of Gabriela, a student who dropped out of high school in LA because she couldn’t pass algebra despite being in her seventh try. He is concerned that, since LA began requiring the passing of a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate, young lives are being ruined. He says in his column (without citing a source) that more kids drop out because of algebra than any other subject. You almost get the feeling from him that, if it weren’t for algebra, these dropouts would all be on the honor roll, passing SATs and getting ready for college.
Cohen admits his bias on the matter. He failed algebra himself, and only passed it the second time via “divine intervention.” The bulk of his column is aimed at Gabriela, telling her that there is life after algebra, and that she’ll never need to know it, and that she’ll never miss it. Such has been his experience.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to tell Gabriela that algebra doesn’t teach reasoning, but that writing “is the highest form of reasoning.” His proof of this assertion “is all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence.” He names no names nor explains how it is he, as a high school student, would have known how well the math whizzes were doing in History or English composition.
Being able to both write and do algebra, I can’t help but notice the lack of the quantitative in Cohen’s thinking. How many whizzes are you talking about, Mr. Cohen? Is it a representative sample? Do you know what a representative sample is? I know you don’t know what a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points means (the error cited in the survey discussed above) because in your column you said you can’t do percentages.
Indeed, Cohen has missed the one thing that algebra and mathematics teach better than any other subject: that being that there are right answers and there are wrong answers, and how you feel about those answers will never, ever, make a difference to what they are. Regardless of how much better your life would be if the answer were different, or how certain you are that the answer really should be something other than what it is, the right answers and the wrong ones will remain just that.
Like I said, I’m depressed. As readers of this magazine know as well or better than most, a twenty-first-century civilization not only cannot advance without adequate literacy, both verbal and mathematical—it cannot survive. A civilization not preparing for the future is surely preparing for a Dark Age. I see a country full of my fellow plane passengers, certain of how things are and what should be done. Yet ignorant, and complacent in that ignorance, about how things really are, and about what really can, and should, be done.
Maybe I’m being too alarmist. Maybe my fellow passengers did understand things better than I’m giving them credit for. Maybe the parents who think their kids are already getting an adequate math education will decide they should check and make sure of it. Maybe Richard Cohen will learn how to use the quadratic equation. But I doubt it.
What do you guys think?
