With Apple Or Google Smart Phones In Our Pockets, Does It Really Matter If We Know Anything?
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I pulled the Crius (Crotty + Prius) into the Union 76 gas station off the Arlington entrance to the 10 Freeway in L.A. Saturday. Waiting on an island between the petrol pumps were two affable girls selling large milk chocolate candy bars out of a shoe box, ostensibly to raise money for their schools. Though I respect any young person courageously hawking a product in such a ruggedly entrepreneurial way, I usually do not donate to such causes because I have no clue where the money actually goes.
Maybe I am gullible or a reverse sexist, but these were young women, so I figured they were earnest. I am lactose-intolerant (though otherwise open-minded), so I have no interest in milk-based anything. However, I was in a generous, if proctorial, mood, so I made these young women a proposition. If they could tell me the first names of the two U.S. Presidents named Roosevelt, I would purchase their entire allotment of large milk chocolate candy bars.
Why Roosevelt, you ask. This is because the first young woman, a tall Latina, attended what she termed “Roosevelt.” That would be Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School in East LA’s working class Hispanic, if rapidly gentrifying, Boyle Heights neighborhood. I figured that if you attend a school named after one of the two presidents named Roosevelt – especially when the full name of the president is in the very name of the school itself – surely you know something about this historically important American family.
However, when I asked her to respond, she stood there dumbfounded. I gently egged her on. “You go to a school named Roosevelt. Surely you can give me the first name of at least one U.S. President named Roosevelt.” She blushed, “I am only in 9th grade.”
I turned at her friend, a slightly shorter Asian-American young woman who stared at me as if I had just accused her of robbing the gas station at gunpoint. “How would I know? I don’t even go to Roosevelt,” she replied defensively.
Many young people reading this will no doubt exclaim, “What does it matter, gramps, if two high school freshmen know a dead white male president or not? They can just look it up on Google.” However, as I wrote in a previous post, “Why General Knowledge Matters, And Why We Should Test For It,” without such fundamental facts, you do not have the context in which to put the proper questions into Google. Moreover, you do not even know if the answer Google gives you back is factually correct or relevant.
For example, if you don’t
know who our 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was, how can you
intelligently discuss the many programs of FDR’s “New Deal” that remain
relevant today – including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC), Social Security, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – let alone his foreign “achievements,” including the Good Neighbor Policy
(which lead to the withdrawal U.S. armed forces from the very Latin
American countries from which our Boyle Heights student’s family likely
descends) and the Yalta Conference in currently contested Crimea, which
set in motion the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) vision for
post-War EUROPE.
FORBES.
