What did we write on our college applications in
response to why we wanted to attend college? Stock responses
include “to be exposed to diverse kinds of thinking and grow
as a human being,” “to gain access to higher
learning,” and “to not focus solely on grades, but also
on being a useful person in the world.”
All this B.S. withstanding, college will change your
world views. They will hopefully widen.
But this is a tricky business. Instead of making one more savvy
and receptive to others’ opinions, amassing education often
produces the very negative side effect of making people
close-minded. The feeling that one has learned all there is to know
from a few classes and textbooks can result in the unwise dismissal
of other views.
Intellectual bias. It’s the flip side of the
“dumbing down” of America most people are inclined to
worry about.
And who exactly are these people lamenting the dumbing down
anyway?
Those that are so politically adept that they have foolproof
solutions to the situation in the Middle East? Those who know maybe
a handful more words than the next guy? Those who, because of their
pseudo-intellect-derived close-mindedness, are just as disabled in
their view of the world as those that would rather scroll through
porn sites than through CNN.com?
Talk about intellectual bias.
I remember I was once having lunch with a friend, a friend with
whom I enjoy having discussions about the abstract. But this time,
the talk became centered on merely a list of empty words.
She was throwing out names of great thinkers and the terms of
great schools of thought. It’s impressive she had digested
all this information, but what was she really talking about?
The conversation turned cold, and I realized I didn’t
really learn more about what she was thinking because she was too
preoccupied in displaying the pretty things she had learned. I
think I liked talking to her better before she took all those
psychology classes, when we used to talked more about our own
theories rather than what new words we learned.
I’ve heard too many empty quotings of Nietzsche around
campus, had too many lattes discussing meaningless philosophical or
political terms. The intellectually biased sound like parrots to
me, and frankly, I’m bored. We should go beyond those thick
textbooks and try to come up with our own discussions.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It encloses you into an
unpleasant membrane of a false sense of fullness based on
name-dropping self-righteousness.
And the inability to think beyond conventional education
doesn’t just imply the individual shutting out original
thoughts; it means the discouraging of the broach of new ideas
themselves. The unified world theory to which we are exposed will
remain unchallenged, and as people continue to exist within their
box of some political spectrum or theological or philosophical
ideals, the kind of revolutionary thinking that defined the past
centuries will go unmatched.
This, ironically, is reminiscent of the dumbing down situation
that furrows some brows. Indeed, too many hard facts emphasized by
classes and textbooks will ultimately deteriorate individual
thought to this kind of static state, making truly original
thinking scarce.
The need for intellectual curiosity doesn’t just apply to
people who don’t read; it extends most to those who do.