EVEN ignorance seems to have a social hierarchy. For a philosopher to
be incapable of mending a tap is almost obligatory. A mathematician is
not expected to cut dovetail joints, or a classicist change a fuse.
Should colleagues become aware that they can, indeed, it might even harm
their career prospects. Yet academics are often the first to complain if
pupils display similar lack of knowledge about everyday life. The latest
cause for educational comment is a survey by Country Life magazine,
which found that 6% of pupils, including those at a prestigious public
school, think that turnips grow on trees. Similar surprise was expressed
some years ago when an even greater number were unaware that milk came
from cows.
We have some sympathy with the schoolchildren. There is no logical
connection between cartons of white liquid and a four-legged animal. The
process of depriving a cow of its calf, indeed, might cause considerable
outrage. Unless one examines a turnip carefully, its underground origins
are not obvious, any more than those of a peanut. Lack of knowledge on
such matters is evident in the Bounty advertisements, which show
coconuts falling from trees already shelled.
What is accepted knowledge in one generation, alas, soon becomes
useless in the next. We may eventually become aware, for instance, that
Sting and Madonna are singers, and suspect that Wet, Wet, Wet is
probably a pop group, but what they sound like we have no idea. We can
identify a Mozart opera immediately, but Boy George not at all. As
Vladimir Nabokov so wisely declared, we are sufficiently proud of
knowing something to be modest about not knowing everything.
All of us, fortunately, know someone more ignorant than ourselves,
even if it is the legendary Sam Goldwyn. ''We can't film The Well of
Loneliness,'' he was once told. ''It's about lesbians.'' ''OK,'' he
replied. ''So where they use lesbians, we'll use Austrians.''
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