The Gift of Fire | Page 9

better? What a pity it is that this poor slob never put himself under my instruction and learned to be better, like me. Ah, well, we can't all be that lucky, and, after all, somebody does have to do all the hard and messy work that I am too educated to do.
And how lucky I am that he is probably rather inarticulate. And I do hope that he remains inarticulate, lest he say what I should hear:
So, I would be better would I, if I were more like you, eh? Do you mean that I too would then be able to recognize and coherently describe the conclusions of Reason before I reject them and decide to do as I please? Is that what you teach in your school - how to go beyond an unknowing obedience to appetite into a fully conscious and willful obedience to appetite? Do you have the brass, Jack, to tell me that it is better to know the good and to refuse it than to be ignorant of the good - as you suppose me - and to miss it? The important differences between us that I can see are that you choose to be irrational and I can't help being irrational, and that you have been rewarded for the cleverness out of which you do that choosing with a handsome collection of diplomas.
Yes, diplomas. About that, at least, he's surely right. I do have all sorts of information that he lacks. I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, although I must admit that I'm no longer sure of the cheerfulness of those many facts about the square of the hypotenuse. Of course, he might also have lots of information that I lack, but the kind of information he has is...well...a different kind of information, you know. Not quite as classy. It's about how to do some sort of work, perhaps, or maybe about baseball statistics or something. It's not that educated kind of information that I have.
Still, the difference does seem to be a matter of information, and, of course, diplomas, which are testimonials to the fact that some other people with lots of the "educated kind" of information were willing to concede that I had acquired some sufficient amount of that too. And, thinking of that, a strange and unnerving thought strikes me. It's not as easy as I thought to define that educated kind of information. Socrates and Aquinas were also utterly ignorant of Dante and Debussy, and they didn't watch any television at all, not even "Masterpiece Theater." They never read Dostoyevski or Kant, and they never even heard of calculus or quantum mechanics. (I, of course, am informed about those two mysteries, which is to say, needless to say, that I have heard of them.) And Socrates never read Aquinas, who did, at least, read Plato, and especially Aristotle, whom Socrates also never read. But it would be very hard, even for me, educated as I am, to deny such minds the rank, if rank it is, of "educated."
On the other hand, I suspect, no, I know, that they would not admit me to that rank. They shared, across many centuries, an idea about education, and about its absolute dependence on Reason rather than information, that we do not share. I'm not so sure about Aquinas, for he was a schoolman, after all, but Socrates cared nothing for schools or diplomas. Both, however, understood that education had no necessary relationship to schools or diplomas, and both held that the true goal of education was to make people able to be good.
I think it's important to put it just that way - able to be good. That phrase contains some remarkable suggestions. We do suppose that the aim of education is to make people able to do some sort of work, to be engineers or physicians or social workers or something else, and we do hope that as many of them as possible will be good at what they do. But by that, we mean "effective." And we are pretty clear about what it is that will make them effective - some combination of talent, information, and practice, producing, of course, some visible and measurable results in the world that we all can see. But Socrates and Aquinas would not want us to confuse any person's effectiveness, his skill in his calling, with his Goodness, quite another thing.
But that's a fairly elementary suggestion of "able to be good." It also suggests that being good is not, as it often seems, and as it surely pleases us to believe, a matter of temperament and character, combined with suitable feelings, and maybe a little bit of luck. It is, rather than a skill, a power and a propensity,