Mark Bauerlein said that I am a member of the “dumbest generation” and I got upset. Who is this guy to call me, a college student at an institution with an esteemed curriculum, stupid?
Immediately, I became defensive. I began mentally listing every academic achievement and accolade to formulate an argument that I would likely never articulate with a man I would likely never meet.
It wasn’t until I began reading the fourth chapter of the essay, appropriately named “Explaining the Concern,” that I began to see where he was coming from. In this chapter, Bauerlein defined the difference between ignorance and knowledge. I will be the first to admit that while I was fully aware there was a distinction between these two terms, I was not fully aware of what that distinction was.
Knowledge, as Bauerlein describes, is what you know while ignorance is what you do not know. Because we live in what Bauerlein calls a knowledge society, the scale of everything there is to know is constantly growing. As generation after generation develops, mine included, more and more intellectuals arise that found their own studies and add to this never-ending pool of research. Even if you dedicated your whole life to studying one specific subject, you would still not be able to claim that you know everything about this topic. There’s simply too much information out there, and not enough time nor motivation to consume it all.
Thus, as our knowledge increases, or, as we continue to learn more and thus produce more intellectual content, our ignorance also increases. This is based on two factors that are attached to the increase of knowledge. One being that the more time we focus on studying one field, we are neglecting some other field of study and thus increasing our ignorance in that field. The other factor is that with knowledge comes the production and public release of academic studies. This adds to the pool of available information I discussed earlier, and thus, adds to the list of topics someone somewhere will never learn about. A phenomenon deemed the knowledge-ignorance paradox. Thus, even though we are still educating ourselves and making intellectual advances, we are simultaneously making it harder to combat ignorance.
This paradox is not necessarily a bad one, however. Our fear of ignorance should not veer us away from continuing to expand the realms of knowledge. Because we are attending college more than those our age in the past, by default, the standards of college admissions are slightly more lenient to accommodate the influx of applicants. In more simpler terms, those that are accepted to major universities today, may have not been accepted hundreds of years ago. So does that mean we should stop attending college to re-establish that sense of elitism? Of course not. Our search for knowledge should never be limited in any manor, even if in this search, we are subvertly erasing the lines that define what it means to be a scholar and making that definition more mundane than it’s past counterpart.
On the same not, as this generation stays in high school and later college more frequently, we are making intellect the new normal, and thus expanding the chasm between the educated and uneducated. This, in effect, makes the uneducated appear a whole lot dumber than they would have in previous generations, where not receiving a higher education was slightly more common. Thus, when looking at the uneducated in my generation, it only seems like it’s a lot worse than it was before. This judgement, however, is merely an illusion.
It’s not that this generation is necessarily less smart than others. We just find ourselves in an odd paradox where in our pursuit of knowledge, we are creating more and more topics in which we could not possibly learn and leaving more and more young adults behind who fail to keep pace. This, unfortunately, is just the price of knowledge. A price we are willing to pay. Of course it is easy to categorize this generation by our dimmer moments, but when you zoom out, you may discover that these moments of ignorance are only products of our extended learning in other areas.
nyah terrilyn 