Irrational Knowledge

Little side moments in life sometimes tell you more about yourself than a deep analysis.  I remember practicing just from curiosity with pastels, when suddenly the total mess of colors on the page came together to somewhat resemble the picture I’d set out to draw.  Wow!  Or that time I got to emote in the class play. Or that time I really had fun, broken glasses and all, in a college game of hand ball.  Political speech writer and columnist Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post the other day, told about the moments he enjoys reading about cosmology even without a clue about what the equations are saying.  That’s all useless knowledge, the kind you can’t earn a dime from and that economists contrast with rational ignorance.  But it surely is fun, and a vital part of what makes us human.

Actually, it turns out that it can be quite useful, only in ways you’d never expect.  Argentina has discovered that making music a required course in school has resulted in significant reductions in juvenile trouble-making, and has improved the general education skills of their children.  A nephew of mine turned a youthful interest in art into a career in helping troubled youth via art therapy.  The son of friends of ours took occasional breaks from his work as an electrical engineer to enjoy theater, until he discovered that his real love was backstage engineering work in theaters, and made a career of it.

That’s why it troubles me that so many public school systems are managing penny-pinching budgets and the costs of increased security by eliminating courses like art, music and theater.  Instead of using art and music to soothe the savage breasts of teenagers, they are hiring more guards.  That they are also limiting the life chances and pleasures of living for their future adults is of no account.  How many future architects and artists and singers are being lost?  Who knows?  But from a utilitarian viewpoint, those are jobs, too.

The problem mostly doesn’t exist in private schools.  They know the value of those “soft” courses, and make them an integral part of their education.  I’m grateful that the private school where my grandsons attend makes music a standard requirement, right along with the fine math, science, history and literature courses they provide.  They know the value of such courses and are willing to pay for them.

The problem is that necessary penny pinching  of public schools.  School boards and county commissions are often stocked with hard-nosed business men who never had a music class and see no need for others to have one either – not at the taxpayers’ expense.  And career educators, who should know better, try to please their bosses.  That was the message of that really good movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus.  That a shy teenage girl had been turned into a future state governor by the experience of studying music was meaningless; Mr. Holland’s job as music teacher was still eliminated.

Yes, better readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic need desperately to be taught and cost money to do so.  But so do music and drama and art.  And they too must be paid for.  And as is obvious from the private – public school contrast, it’s the poorer kids who suffer when they’re not.  The well known reason is that the costs of public education are funded by the property tax.  Poor neighborhoods lack the high property values that enable good education.

There’s a lot of talk these days about education reform, from charter and magnet schools to core standards.  There’s value in all those things.  But no real reform is going to occur until public schools are better funded, and that requires reforming the property tax system.  Economists and other pennypinchers go on about the rationality of ignorance, but that doesn't work anymore in our 21^st century world.  It’s time we started celebrating the irrational human beauty of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and started digging into our pockets to provide it.  Our children, and our futures, deserve it.