Sometimes I find myself surprised by the types of things my kids don’t know, but that’s nothing compared with the kinda stuff adults don’t know. Witness this example from an article in the New York Times on The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby: (she overheard this conversation on 9-11-01)

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

See with me, the problem isn’t the fact that people don’t know a given fact, it’s that in many cases, they don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that they don’t know. Ignorance is one thing. Deliberately maintained ignorance, however, is just ig’nant.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Everwhatever.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.