The decay of truth in education

Poor Elijah has threatened for years to give up helping Aunt Lenore with crossword puzzles. Last time she needed the name of a former African country starting with D. He suggested “Dahomey,” but she decided on “Denmark,” even though Denmark’s been a well-publicized part of Europe for years.

Poor Elijah doesn’t mind if she’d rather visit Denmark or eat Danish pastry or listen to Victor Borge reading Hamlet. These are matters of taste and opinion. But if you’re talking Africa, Denmark doesn’t work. It isn’t there.

Facts can be like that. They’re often inconvenient. Opinions seem more negotiable. That’s why we like them better.

Sometimes our flight from reality takes the form of entertainment. Moviemaker Oliver Stone is famous for obliterating the line between history and wild conjecture. His movie “JFK” rearranged facts to suit conspiracy theories. According to his film Nixon, reactionary Texans who look like Larry Hagman are secretly running the country.

For many of us, yarns like these are merely entertaining. It’s fun to watch actors dress up in suits with narrow lapels. How can you pass up Paul Sorvino’s Henry Kissinger impression or Anthony Hopkins’ Welsh rendition of “I am not a crook.”

A foreword to the film notes that the scriptwriter freely filled in the historical blanks wherever they popped up. Mr. Stone would probably maintain that he was trying to capture the “spirit” of history rather than the literal facts. He was, like all storytellers, rearranging things here and there to hold our interest.

This is nothing new. Legends like Robin Hood have muddled history and delighted us for generations. And even when we’ve tried our best, over the centuries, we’ve frequently found it tough to distinguish facts from fiction.

Lately, though, we don’t seem to recognize or even care about the distinction. Hour after hour, we indulge ourselves watching staged humiliations, videotaped intimacies, contrived confessions, and 24-hour scripted narcissism, all under the banner of televised reality.

And now reality television comes to us live from the Resolute desk.

How have we reached the point where facts are so out of fashion? How have we fallen so far that a Presidential “counselor” can posit the existence of “alternative facts”? How have we grown so habituated to lies?

It’s partly because we’ve tampered with the definition of truth. Some thinkers get really philosophical about this. They say we each see the world through our own individual eyes. According to this seemingly tolerant perspective, something can be true for me without being true for you. This approach works pretty well when it comes to matters of taste or opinion — whether to paint the house blue or green, or spend your vacation in Maine or Miami. Other times, it leaves us on perilous ground.

Blue might be pretty to me and ugly in your eyes, but something can’t be a fact for me without being a fact for everybody else. Water boils at 212 degrees, whether or not I agree. The earth revolves around the sun even if your name is Ptolemy. People who walk off buildings fall even if they don’t believe in gravity.

The truth isn’t feeble. It humbles the wise man. It topples the fool.

That’s why the decades-long, unrelenting educational contempt for facts that I’ve witnessed as a teacher is so dangerous. What do we do with the mob of education experts who demand the end of specific subjects like algebra and literature so schools can instead teach students to “connect what they know,” or as is more likely, what they don’t know? What do we do with a Newbery Award history book for children that was “written as an antidote for the tyranny of facts”?

History is clearly more than the sum of its facts. It does, however, need to rest on those facts as they really are.

Reformers like to quote Albert Einstein, who once observed that imagination is superior to knowledge. Experts use his proverb to bolster their contention that teaching facts and knowledge is less important than encouraging creativity. After all, they tell us, Einstein himself said so. The trouble is the statement might be true once you know as much as Einstein, but most of us, including most students, don’t. It makes equal sense when math reformers justify teaching algebra to all eighth-graders on the grounds that Isaac Newton invented calculus when he was 16.

I’ve been teaching for 33 years. I’ve yet to run into a Newton.

A few years ago one of Poor Elijah’s students insisted that Delaware was in New England. Poor Elijah gently explained that this was incorrect, but his student wasn’t impressed. “Many people,” the young man declared, “consider Delaware a New England state.”

Maybe they do. Hopefully, they don’t. Either way, Delaware isn’t in New England anymore than beach umbrellas are vegetables.

It’s fine to claim, as theorists do, that schools should be teaching students to think, but simply thinking something doesn’t make it so. Neither does shouting it. Facts are more than opinions stated in a louder voice. They aren’t determined by majority vote or by Presidential decree. They’re the small details that constitute the truth.

Wisdom and sound decisions don’t ordinarily spring from ignorance and a contempt for knowledge.

The truth has a way of catching up with us. Even if we close our eyes and say it isn’t coming.