stead of studying philosophy, history, and literature—which are
the experiences of all humankind—they study specific technolo-
gies. In the long run narrow specialties may be more prone to
obsolescence and may fail to deliver big salaries, let alone the
incalculable rewards of a more broadly examined life.
Educator and former Disney executive Marty Kaplan said,
“You spend your early years asking your parents all the big
questions—where am I from, why did Grandpa die and where
did he go, and who is God? Kids are sponges for that stuff.
What do undergraduates talk about in the middle of the night
but that stuff? What am I doing with my life, who am I, all
those questions that we encourage in a liberal arts confronta-
tion with the abyss. I think that’s at the core of our notion of
what Western values are, the confrontation with the abyss, and
some people will call the abyss death in a sort of casual biologi-
cal sense, while some people have a much more metaphysical
conception of nothingness, but I think it starts in the child, and
we either let it flourish or repress it, but it’s always there, and
it’s always going to be there.”
Poet Richard Wilbur wrote, “But ceremony never did con-
ceal,/Save to the silly eye, which all allows,/How much we are
the woods we wander in.” We need to wander through all the
woods at our disposal, and out of all that to begin to under-
stand ourselves and the world.
In the mid–1980s, the issue of our cultural illiteracy reached
the best-seller lists, with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the Amer-
ican Mind and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Cultural Literacy: What Every
American Needs to Know. A nationwide test of history and litera-
ture given to 7,800 high school juniors proved Bloom and
Hirsch’s thesis. The average score, as reported in What Do Our
17-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr.,
was in the 50s—an F.
Knowing the World