Thursday, June 26, 2008

Choice Quotes: Joe Berry #3

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

From “Getting Down to Work” (114-5):

Our years of schooling tend to convince us that the best way to change anything is to learn all we can about it and then write up our findings and conclusions in the most balanced, rational, complete, and detailed way we can.  We have been conditioned to think that finding the full truth about something, whether in our own academic field or our employment situation, will make us free all by itself.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  My father, a teacher for over forty years from secondary to graduate school levels, used to toll me that too much formal education tended to make people lose their common sense.  He blamed formal education for the fact that it took most teachers until the 1960s and 1970s to realize they needed a union when most carpenters had figured it out by 1900 or 1910.  The idea that individually knowing the truth would make us free, without any collective action on our part, was an example, to him, of that loss of common sense.  Luckily, even the “overeducated” can still learn, albeit sometimes painfully and slowly.  The key to this learning is doing it together.

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