The Gift of Fire | Page 9

mess.
I find myself feeling sorry for him, and imagining how much better a
person he might have been had he only spent more of his life paying
close attention, and some fees, to people like me. I am, after all, a
teacher. Have I not pledged myself to make people 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