It's not hard to make sense of the world around you if you have no tools, indeed no desire, to make sense of anything

Crazy Liberals

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

I often quote a great line from the late educational reformer John Holt, from his second book, How Children Learn, the sequel to his surprise-hit How Children Fail (and even after all these decades I think I remember it pretty well): "A child has no greater desire than to make sense of the world around him." He was registering skepticism about the educational establishment's obsession with "motivating" kids to learn, and his point -- at least as I've always taken it -- seemed on the money: that not just the educational system but the society at large seems to do everything in its power to obliterate the natural curiosity that, as John put it so beautifully, makes children want to make sense of the world around them. As I've mentioned here a number of times, I long ago adopted this formulation -- learning to make sense of the world around us -- as my working definition of education.

I've always thought of that process of learning how we perceive bits of reality and how they fit together and what's real and what isn't, that all of that is part of the essential process of human maturing -- and, all in all, kind of an interesting one at that. But for a lot of people in society, people given to seeking control of other people for various reasons of their own (the authoritarian agenda comes in an assortment of flavors), natural curiosity, far from being a welcome thing, is a danger. It leads to questions and possibly unorthodox thinking. And let's face it, a lot of people are happy to be spared the task of, well, making sense of the world around them, and are more than happy, indeed happier, to just be told what to think.

It always seemed to me the special genius of Ronald Reagan to appreciate this quality in people and to understand that people would be delighted to be told that they don't have to grapple with reality, but instead can simply trust to two sources:

(1) any stray neural impulse that fires in their brains,

(2) what they're told by their controlling authorities -- religious or whatever, but mainly religious, unless you're partial to, say, Rush Limbaugh.

The neat thing is that any "evaluation" of those realities is automatic. With regard to (1), Reagan's inspiration was to tell people that the only measure of the truth of those impulses firing in their brains is: What does it make you feel best to believe? If you want to believe it, it's true, and if you don't, then to hell with it! People who might have felt a tad sheepish about being so plug-ignorant suddenly learned that they were in charge of their realities. And it was Morning in America! Of course with regard to (2), there isn't even any need for "evaluation." If you accepted authority says it, it's true, end of discussion.

Which is what I love about this week's Tom Tomorrow strip. He's gotten both processes down perfectly. Global warming? Fuhgeddaboutit! Look at all that snow! And if you try to reframe the discussion in terms of "climate change" rather than just global warming (although goodness knows the global warming is happening, and disastrously so, it's part of a more complex process), with particulars . . . well, then the person determined not to think can turn to his "authorities." Where do you suppose this poor chap heard about obviously not being able "to draw long-term conclusions from a handful of isolated events"? Do you suppose he has the slightest clue what it means?

Because, after all, drawing permanent conclusions from no facts at all is basically the principle he's been brought up to apply to, well, all of life.

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