The Modern Phenomenon of Ignorance to the Third Degree

Colleges are creating students who don’t want to learn.

I recently had an altercation with a typical graduate of our American system of education. That is, I got into it with a self-satisfied ignoramus. The topic was the vast areas of general knowledge that college freshmen are innocent of, although even stating the problem in those words is somewhat optimistically misleading. A farmer in the New Hampshire that Robert Frost lived in might — might, I say — be ignorant of Shakespeare, in the sense that he had not read the man’s plays. Perhaps he had encountered only a speech or two here and there, such as Marc Antony’s brilliant dissection, by innuendo, of the motives of Brutus and Cassius, who are, he says, “honorable men” — and he says it so often, we know he means us to understand that they are treacherous and ambitious double-dealers. My father, who though he was a very intelligent man was no reader of books, which were rare to come by when he was growing up, would often quote lines from that speech. He had read Julius Caesar in high school. Still, if you’d ask him whether he knew a lot about Shakespeare, or even knew more than a very little, he’d say he did not. (VIDEO: Satan Club to Convene at Connecticut Elementary School)

That, we may say, is ignorance in the first degree. If you look under your car’s hood and you see steam coming up from somewhere that is not the radiator, you say, “That’s no good.” You have no idea what to do, though — you are ignorant in the first degree. But if you were a savage in the jungles of Borneo, staring at the very same vehicle, with the same steam, you would not only be ignorant of what to do, but you would not know that there was such a thing as an automobile in the first place, or if you did know, you would have a vague idea that it was magical, not subject to the rules that govern the rest of human life. You would be ignorant in the second degree. This kind of ignorance is by no means limited to savages or even to uneducated people. The atheist who would not know how to begin to...