Common knowledge? These days, not so much
Every day I start off my high-school English class with a Word of the Day. Most teenagers’ vocabularies, I have found, are pretty limited. I figure I’ll do my little part to help expand them one word at a time.
One day last week, the word for my Secondary IV class was “enigma.” I gave a definition, used it in a sentence and then mentioned, in passing, the quote of Churchill when asked to describe Russia: “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
As soon as I mentioned it, I started wondering just how many kids in my class actually knew who Sir Winston Churchill was, the man regarded by many as one of the most important people of the 20th century: prime minister during England’s darkest hours and a key figure in saving Western civilization from a collapse into the tyranny and darkness of Nazi rule in the Second World War.
And so I asked my class. Two kids raised their hands. One thought he was a former president of Great Britain; the other said she thought she’d heard of a bar with that very name in Montreal. No one else had a clue who he was. (“How many of you know who Kim Kardashian is?” I then asked. Everyone’s hand went up.)
Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Talk to just about any teacher today and you’ll hear similar tales, usually accompanied by grimaces and sighs. You mention something — some person, some event, some thing that you figure any semi-educated person must be familiar with, and you’ll notice, from the blank expressions, that the teenagers you’re talking to don’t have the foggiest notion what on Earth you are referring to.
Furthermore — and this I find more disturbing — they often don’t want to know. “Why do I have to know that?” they ask.
It’s a question I heard repeatedly when I taught Canadian history. You live here, I would say. You’re a citizen of this country. You owe it to yourself to understand how we ended up the way we are today. How and why are we different from Americans? Why is there a continuing threat of Quebec separation? Who helped make this country what it is? The unexamined life is not worth living, etc
Yeah, they would invariably say, but why do I have to know this stuff ?
It’s ironic, isn’t it? Students today have access to far more information, through the Internet, than we had 30 or 40 years ago. And yet obviously access doesn’t mean knowledge — or at least knowledge of what used to seem like part of who we are.
It would be easy to descend completely into old-fogeyism and drone on about the decline of civilization and how we were so much smarter in our day, but I don’t quite believe it myself. The fact is, some of the courses they do in high school today are harder than what I and my confrères studied 40 years ago. Then, too, there are kids I teach now who constantly amaze me with their insights and sophistication. They are far brighter than I was at their age.
But the fact remains that we just seemed to know more stuff when we were kids. I don’t know where we learned it, but somehow there was a body of knowledge that we assimilated. Words and names like Charles Lindbergh or the Wright Brothers or Sir John A. Macdonald or D-Day or Cary Grant or the Mackenzie River or Babe Ruth or Piccadilly Circus or FDR or Joe McCarthy, and countless others, meant something to us. They triggered an immediate recognition. I don’t remember anyone teaching us about them. Maybe we learned it by osmosis; I don’t know. But one thing is for sure: Many kids aren’t learning them today.
And while no one has to know any of those names, places and events, I feel sad that so many young people today don’t. There is a comfort, a reassurance, in shared knowledge — of making a reference and seeing a sign of recognition, a nod, a knowing smile. It’s a reminder that we share not only the same planet and some of the same daily experiences, but also a body of knowledge that unites us into a community, binding us and making us feel, in some ways, as one and not alone.