Today's students are more specialized

May 19, 2006

SPECTRUM/Art Carney

Could students of today pass the high school exit exams used a couple hundred years ago? Abe Lincoln was able to use formal arguments and analytic reasoning to prove the logical conclusions he made during his political debates. The best-educated politicians of today are probably not able to do that, but does that mean there has been a dumbing-down process of today's students?

During the 17th century Enlightenment, illiteracy was the norm, and only society's upper class had access to the knowledge of past ages. Fortunately for us, many women and men of that privileged minority spent much of their leisure lives discussing, writing, thinking and arguing about human nature, politics and especially natural philosophy - which included everything else. Their interest and efforts laid the foundation for political reform, the advance of science and modern civilization.

A couple hundred years later, most people of the Industrial Age could read and write, but higher education still was confined mostly to the upper class of society. However, by that time the knowledge about the original topics of study had expanded so much it had to be separated into a number of additional classifications. This made it possible for the educated elite - including Lincoln - the means to achieve a deeper understanding of any particular subject of interest, such as political philosophy.

And today, after another 150 years of human progress, higher education readily is available to the great majority of modern people, including today's high school students. However, the amount of today's human knowledge has increased beyond the capacity of any single person, and the knowledge has been subdivided into hundreds of different categories, each of which has many separate areas of expertise.

It is doubtful that Lincoln and our present students could pass each other's high school exams because Lincoln's required a comprehensive understanding of a few subjects, while ours is geared toward a shallow understanding of many subjects. Simply put, Lincoln's knowledge was deep while our knowledge is broad. The effect is that today's specialists know more and more about less and less - more details about particular subjects. But even so, taken together they are able to do more good for more people.

We are not dumbing down the students of today, we are teaching them to function in the 21st century, and while there is little interest in formal logic, our students know where to find the information they want or need. It's not our IQs that have changed, it is the range of our knowledge and the nature of our needs that are different. We know how to use technology, but its maintenance requires expertise, so we must rely on many different experts to keep our technology functioning properly. In a manner of speaking, mankind has traded the former Dark Age dependence on the church for a modern dependence on science, but we are better off for it, since science has removed much of the human misery that was present before the Enlightenment.

But even so, modern science cannot guarantee human happiness. It is not the amount of knowledge or the lack of misery that constitutes a happy life, it is our own use of reason that allows us to use our personal knowledge, preferences and circumstances toward the betterment of our own well-being.

For those who care to think about such things, an honest self-knowledge will reveal the essential elements that are required for a reasonably good personal life.

Regardless of our IQ rating, we must depend on our own actions and attitudes to achieve our own happiness, which mostly depends on our relationships with family, friends and community.

Art Carney lives in Wasilla.