Circular Cruises/Dumping Core

Dumping Core

7 September 2000

I have ranted many times in the past (and gotten in a lot of trouble) about something I considered a fairly simple idea: Knowledge.

Turns out the idea isn't very simple at all. What should people know? When is a unit of information something that one can reasonably expect every adult American to have, and when is it rarefied, specialist knowledge? When am I being elitist, and when am I just attempting to maintain a standard?

I have a lot of information, some of it fairly useless, floating around my brain. I do forget sometimes that not everyone has a brain full of factoids, and that's usually when I get in trouble. Nor do I expect everyone to clutter their brain with debris the way I have.

And yet ... and yet ... I can't help but feel that the standards of minimal knowledge, the core requirements, are slowly declining. I don't consider this a good thing.

Once upon a time, in British schools, every young lad learned Latin - whether they liked it or not. They learned the succession of the British throne and the histories of the kings. They learned a whole lot of specialized, textbook knowledge, via force-feeding ... most of which, let it be said right now, was completely useless to them for the rest of their lives.

(And of course the system had many other problems - for example, women weren't getting anywhere close to the same education - but let's stick to one type of gripe, it makes this rant cleaner.)

American schools were a little more practical at first - and a lot more minimal - people were simply too busy with the business of survival to bother. But gradually, when people could stand still long enough to worry about education-as-status-symbol, the British model came in, and suddenly it was the done thing to send your kids off to fill up with useless junk ... for anyone who could afford to do so.

I am happy whenever I see people rebelling against the idea of "core knowledge" they neither want nor need. I myself am on record as being opposed to core curricula in colleges; my attitude is, I am paying for my education and I therefore should get to choose what I am learning.

But - and this is a big "but" - I regard colleges as places to pick up secondary, specialized knowledge in one's chosen profession. My assumption is that by the time you leave high school, you already got what I consider to be the minimal required core - that you already picked up the minimal set of knowledge you need for daily life in the universe with the rest of us.

That doesn't always seem to be true. So this is how I reconcile wanting people to have a certain minimal set of knowledge with my hatred for a college "humanities requirement" or some such: I believe you should have gotten the minimal core in high school or even earlier, and that college is for specialization. So the fault lies in both places - with the colleges for attempting to pick up the slack of the high schools, and with the high schools for not adequately preparing students in the first place.

Does that sound harsh? You fail to appreciate just how minimal my minimal set really is. I am not talking arcane stuff here. At least, it doesn't seem arcane to me. You be the judge. The rest of this essay is my list of What You Should Know As A Functioning Adult American. (Readers in other countries will need to make minor substitutions here and there.) Most of it you should have learned before you got out of high school. (Literature and Art are obvious exceptions - these things take time - and the Home Ec stuff, despite its name, is best learned in the school of life.)

COMPOSITION

The most fundamental set of skills: reading and writing. Since I don't have a better name for them, I will call them "composition." The freshman comp class is an abomination - not for its existence so much as the fact that there are people who get out of high school needing it.

Reading:

You should be able to read the average novel written for adult age without any difficulty whatsoever. I'll grant you ignorance of the occasional five-dollar word, but one part of comprehension is vocabulary; in the text above, I would not have expected you to stumble over any words, including "abomination," "arcane," "elitist," "rarefied," or "reconcile."

You should be able to take apart the language of the average rental or service contract and piece together an accurate idea of what you're signing.

I'm not going to try to mandate that you enjoy reading or that you read a certain number of books a year. I'll just be sad if you don't.

Writing:

You should be able to collect and organize your thoughts enough to write a short persuasive essay, with one coherent point per paragraph or section. You should know how to write a formal business letter. You should know how to write grammatically in your native language. If you can't spell, you should know how to find the correct spellings and check your work. You should know how to avoid usages which make you look like a hick. In short, you should know how to write something which gives the appearance that you know what you're doing.

Research:

Knowing how to find information is more important than knowing the information itself. You should know how to tease Google into giving you useful things and not paid advertising placement. You should know how to get actual facts from Wikipedia. You should know how to get information from multiple sources to check your work. You should know how to use your library's computer system if it has one. Do not neglect old-school resources. While I no longer insist that you know how to use a card catalog, you should know how your local bookstore(s) and library organize their books, for example. Someday you're going to need to find something on paper. Your children might not, but you do.

And you should know how to take a large non-fiction or reference book, look at it for a couple of hours, and come away with a reasonably filled-in picture of the specific information you need. If you have this skill, then you can patch any holes you may have in all of the skills below.

This is one of the places I get most stubborn. If I could make everyone take one class and only one, it would be what my high school used to call "study skills." If you know how to find information then it doesn't matter what else on this list you do or don't know, because you will always be able to get it when you need it. I see no evidence so far that the post-web generations have magically gotten better at this.

MATH

Most math is pretty useless in the real world. Let it be said [with apologies to the people in specialized professions whose "real world" does, indeed, require it]. But that doesn't mean you get off the hook completely.

Basic Arithmetic:

Know how to multiply, divide, add, subtract, and take percentages. Too obvious? Not really. You'd be amazed how many people's heads spin when confronted by fractions or percentages (which are just a special kind of fraction). Calculating the tip in a restaurant, for example. I don't ask you to be able to multiply or divide big numbers in your head - just be able to do it on paper quickly and correctly - but I do think you should be able to do ten, fifteen, and twenty percent of an amount without getting out a pen.

(Take the amount - pre-tax if you're Nonelvis, post-tax if you're me - and move the decimal point one place to the left. That's ten percent. Ten percent of 19.50 is 1.95. For twenty percent, double that - hmm, a little less than four bucks ... I'd probably tip four. For fifteen percent, take the ten percent amount plus half of itself. 1.95, plus about ninety cents ... I'd probably tip three bucks.)

I expect you to be able to balance your checkbook. I expect you to be able to look at percentage rates and your credit card statement and know when you're being swindled - when the rate is so high that your payments aren't touching the principal, just the interest. And I expect you to know what that sentence meant.

You should know how to use the factor-label method, even if you don't call it that. This is a valuable skill for converting between various units of measurement which I wish more people had. It goes like this: Say you have a wall two yards long and you need to know how much that is in centimeters. You can look up the conversions, but how do you string 'em together? You start with what you have, and then put the conversions one by one in order, like this.

2 yards   3 feet   12 inches   2.54 centimeters
        x ------ x --------- x ---------------- = ?
          1 yard   1 foot      1 inch

If the units match - that is, if the top of the previous fraction has the same units as the bottom of the next one - then your answer will automatically come out in the correct units. Just treat the whole thing as alternating multiplications and divisions, one after the other (the fraction bar is division). That is, 2 times 3, divided by 1, times 12, divided by 1, times 2.54 ... yes, the dividing by one doesn't do anything, but sometimes you have other numbers down there, so I'm doing it by the book.

Algebra:

You should know how to solve for X. This is not a skill you'll ever actually use in an algebraic sense; it's more like a required thinking exercise.

That is, in 2x+4 = 12, I expect you to know to subtract 4 from both sides (2x = 8) then divide both sides by two (x = 4). One day you will need to think this way. Honest.

Geometry:

You should know how to compute the area and perimeter of triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles. You should know that pi begins 3.1415 - this is good enough for gardening and rough carpentry, and simplifies the math enough that you can do it on paper. You should know the Pythagorean theorem and what it means and how to use it.

SCIENCE

Chemistry:

Most of the chemistry you need to know is household chemistry: how the foods, drugs, and chemicals around you do the things they do, which ones you shouldn't mix, and how to decipher product labels to at least a limited extent. You should know the difference between acids and alkalines, and you should know that in sufficient strength, the contact burns from either look exactly identical. You should handle bleach with about the same care you'd handle hydrochloric acid. You should know what Drano is and why it's dangerous, especially when a little water is added to it. You should know why you don't want to mix baking soda and lemon juice before adding them to the batter.

Your reaction to an all-sugar candy, such as Life Savers, billing itself as a "fat-free food" should be "Duh." Your reaction to any non-animal-fat product billing itself as cholesterol-free should be the same. You should know that fiber does what it does because it is largely indigestible. You should know that some vitamins are water-soluble and not retained by the body, and some are fat-soluble and are. You should know what proteins do and how starches and sugars are related.

You should know not to put both Comet (which is basically bleach, soap, and sand) and ammonia compounds or other toilet bowl cleaners in your toilet bowl at the same time, and why. Things like that. These are just a few examples.

Biology:

Mostly biochemistry and anatomy. I do expect a little taxonomy; that is, I want you to know an arachnid from an insect, I want you to know which aquatic creatures are mammals and what makes a mammal, et cetera. But the bulk of what you need from biology is about your own body - how its chemistry works and what your organs do. No, I don't expect you to know the Krebs cycle or even what it is, but you should be aware, for example, of why your muscles go into cramps when you're trying to walk or run without the carbohydrates in your stomach to support them. You should know exactly how difficult it is to get your body to convert to burning its long-term storage (that is, fat) and why. You should understand what cancer is, what diabetes is, and what things your body doesn't like you to do.

Think of it as being required to read the owner's manual for your body, and you'll get a sense of the kind of information I mean.

Geology:

I expect you to know the different types of rock and soil, and the visual characteristics of each, with a special eye toward identifying the types which are common where you live. I expect you to know how to do a primitive soil composition test with a glass jar, some dirt from your yard, and a little water.

[N.B. I heard heavily about this one from people who did not own homes. While I consider this tragic, if you are such a concrete-jungle human that you never tend a yard or a garden, never ever, then consider this section negated.]

Botany:

Substitute "trees" and "plants" for "rock" and "soil" in the first sentence above.

[N.B. I'll back down a little here, too. Me, I like to know what I'm looking at. I'm not as good at botany as I'd like to be, and I consider it a personal flaw that I can't identify more of the trees and plants in my daily life. Apparently many of you don't care so much. But I admit I can't think of many situations where not knowing what kind of plant you're standing next to is actually detrimental - except maybe for poison ivy.]

Physics:

Simple formulae only, the ones which you already understand the ideas behind but panicked when you were fed them in school. "Force equals mass times acceleration." What the heck does that mean? It means that if you roll a shopping cart against the wall, it'll hit the wall harder the faster it was moving, and it'll also hit harder the more groceries you piled in it. Duh, eh? In a similar vein, you should know that "work" is not just how hard you exert (force), but the how hard you exert over a period of time, in the same way that "acceleration" is the way speed changes over a period of time.

You should know that heat flows - you should think of heat as a substance, like a liquid or gas, so you can try to predict where it's going to go. You should think like the physics people do about cold; that it is a condition of negative heat. You should know that most fireplaces are really inefficient (but sexy) ways to heat a room. You should know that decreasing the amount of space a gas has to move around in, or increasing its temperature, also increases its pressure ... and that the two are tied together, so when you compress air into something, it heats up.

On a related note, you should also know why foods cook and liquids boil differently at different altitudes.

You should know that entropy always increases if left unattended. That is, systems - anywhere from the debris on your coffee table to the entire universe at large - tend to change from more orderly states to less orderly ones unless an effort is made to reverse the flow. And sometimes that effort isn't possible.

LINGUISTICS

I already mentioned the command I expect you to have over your native language. I will not say you automatically have to learn another. I will say that if you're in a section of the country where there is a de facto second language (which is to say, Spanish), you should try to be reasonably familiar with the basics or "tourist" lingo - know a few nouns and a few verbs (even if you can't conjugate them), all the pronouns, and all the question words. This will take you far. In fact, that goes for other languages as well.

As for that Latin - no, I honestly do not expect anyone to learn Latin in this day and age except the occasional taxonomist. But I do expect you to be able to think about the words descended from it and dope out a meaning every once in a while. I expect you to look at "cave canem" and see "caveat" for the first word and "canine" for the second, and maybe you'll be able to get somewhere close to Beware of Dog. [N.B. It has become a running joke for us here how many Jeopardy! contestants know tons of completely obscure things, but lack even such a rudimentary knowledge of Latin roots as to be unable to connect "ursa" with "bear."]

PHILOSOPHY

My university put logic, which I considered mathematics, in the philosophy department, which pissed me off no end at the time. To me philosophy was abstract wool-gathering, whereas logic is an exact, precise science. Then - much later - I realized that philosophy was fundamentally about how to think ... and the pairing made sense.

Most people can philosophize just fine on their own. But here are two skills that seem to be suffering:

Religion:

You should know at least a little background about each of the world's major religions ... with an emphasis on skills for the traveller - that is, what they do and don't approve of (don't drink booze in Muslim countries), and when their holidays and major rituals are, and what they entail.

Logic:

You should learn how to pick holes in someone else's premises. "Some" is not "all," and it may not even be "most." When a statement is negated, pay attention to how it's being negated. If I say that "all bus drivers do not like gerbils," it's not the same as saying that "not all bus drivers like gerbils." Watch for false connections between ideas. Just because hemlines go up when sunspot activity increases (true) does not mean that the sun is influencing fashion designers. Nor can anyone prove it either way.

HISTORY

I include here what some places call "anthropology," because I don't think it's a separate discipline. You should know history. History is important. It's also sometimes boring because people teach it as a rote list of names and dates. This is a pity; it's one of the things I would most urgently like to fix about education. History only works if the student knows why they need to know this - something, I add with despair, I have trouble communicating to my peers, grown adults who shouldn't need it explained.

[N.B. I feel the need to point out that the rest of this section is geared to American readers. Readers of other nations would have to make numerous substitutions, but the point stands.]

You don't need to remember the presidents in order and when they served; you don't even need to remember all their names. But you do need to know what each president's most pressing crisis was. You need to know, for example, that the early history of our country consisted of a battle between federal control and state's rights, and which side "won," and why this battle comes back to haunt us now and again.

You need to know that major battles on whether to cut back or entirely exclude immigrants were happening long before the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan. That fears of technological obsolescence predate the computer. History repeats itself.

You need to know why the Civil War was fought, and why it wasn't a foregone conclusion who'd win ... and why history books tend to have an incorrect or incomplete picture of Reconstruction.

You need to know about the World Wars - why they happened, why we entered both of them comparatively late in the game, and how the second one wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the way the first one ended. And how the end of the second one locked history into a fixed pattern and mode of thought that we are only now breaking away from, over fifty years later.

You need to know something about the histories of other countries, too - it helps you understand their national character, just as the history of our country helps explain ours. And you need - urgently - to understand how our culture is flooding the world, why we are the biggest kid on the block, and how this has made the road ahead for us increasingly difficult.

You should know about the Protestant Reformation and why it happened, about the trends we call the Dark Ages and the Renaissance and why they happened, about the Industrial Revolution and why it happened ... and in general, be able to track the progress of progress.

[N.B. I still hear about this part, and I still ain't budging. I will say it again: History repeats itself. In fact I tell you three times: History repeats itself. If you don't have at least a passing idea what happened when it happened before, it will render you less able to react or interpret in a useful way when it's happening now.]

GEOGRAPHY

Know where every nation is.

I'm not asking you to take a blank political map of the world and be able to fill in all the names. But you should be able to tell me not only which continent Sierra Leone is in, but roughly where it's located in that continent. (And, ideally, why it's not a good place to visit.) I don't expect you to know who its neighbors are, but I do expect you to be able to find out in a hurry if you hear about it on the news.

LITERATURE

This is the hard part [and the most useless part]. Literature inevitably comes down to "who have you read?" ... and that's a dangerous game, to say the least. I am not going to bother with the futile exercise of saying, "You should know about these writers/artists" - even I have my limits. It is more important to read - and to cross as many genre lines as possible - than what you read.

FINE ARTS

The visual arts are even harder to judge than the literary ones, and yet in some ways easier. Easier because I refuse to give them as much time or effort as I do books. I know not everyone will agree, but I see it like this: Words create culture - our culture is drawn in the shape of our observations, articles, fiction, criticism, et cetera. Art reflects culture. The visual arts comment on our culture after the fact.

[N.B. OK, I concede that even back when I wrote it I knew that statement would start a fight or two. But the thing is, that fight, while entertaining, distracts from the main point I am trying to make here. I've left it in, but I'm sorry I said it. And, in fact, as of 2009, I'm no longer sure I agree with it. But let's press on.]

I must stress that knowing about art is more important in some ways than knowing particular artists (just as knowing about literature is just as important as having read particular writers). As long as you had some idea what Impressionism is, what Surrealism and Cubism are, what happened to realistic art and the Paris Salon about the time of Monet and his peers, and what happened to art after Dada ... you are ahead of the game.

HOME ECONOMICS

And, finally, the skills of daily life. Some of these can be taught, some can be studied, but most can only be learned. I feel we should all know them, though, by the time we have to live as adults.

You should be able to use needle and thread in simple ways - repairing a small rip or sewing a button back on.

I don't ask you to understand electrical wiring, but I do expect you to know why one prong of the plug is bigger than the other, why you need a circuit breaker or fuse box, and why the outlet in the bathroom, in most houses, is a special one with a couple of odd buttons in the middle.

I don't ask you to understand carpentry, but I expect you to be able to find a stud in a wall using a stud finder, and how to put in a fastener that won't pull out (anchor screw or toggle screw) when there isn't a stud handy. Otherwise your pictures will fall down if they weigh anything at all.

And you should know how to hammer a nail or drive a screw reasonably straight, and when to use which.

You should know and understand the operation of any appliance you use regularly. That means reading the directions, not unpacking it and figuring you can bluff. Even a vacuum cleaner has hidden pitfalls. Your heating and cooling systems are appliances, for this exercise; just bigger ones, which makes it even more important to understand how and why they can go wrong.

You should know why your sink has that U-shaped bend in the pipe under the basin (and how to remove it when the need arises). You should know that there's a similar U-shaped bend in the back of your toilet bowl that you can't see. You should be able to unclog both without using chemicals. You should know where your waste goes and where your water comes from.

You should be able to make a simple meal for yourself without using any prepared foods - no canned soups, no mixes, no instant anything. Doesn't have to be Cordon Bleu, but everyone should be able to fry an egg or a hamburger.

If you operate a car on a regular basis, you should have some basic idea of how it works. No, you don't have to know how to repair it or even know how to change your oil. But if you know a little about its anatomy, you're less likely to think your tire's falling off when it's just your brake pads wearing down ... or, more dangerously, vice versa. And it helps prevent swindles at repair shops. You should also know how to find the section of your owner's manual that specifies what sizes and types of replacement parts to use, and how often to do regular maintenance.

If you have an office job then you should know how to type. You don't have to touch type especially well, but you should definitely be better than hunt-and-peck level.

You should know how to iron, which fabrics wrinkle and which shrink, what's colorfast and what isn't, and how to remove the most common types of stains.

Know the best adhesives for the material being glued.

And always wear sunscreen.

Copyright © September 2000. All rights reserved.