enthalpy

Sunday, November 13, 2005


It's always been the case that smart people were nerds. That's just the way it is, but something happened in the last 10 years to make ignorance flat out cool.
All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

This lack of curiosity is especially disturbing because it infects our broader culture. Unfortunately, it seems both inevitable and incurable.
Just because being smart is un-cool, that doesn't make it cool to be an idiot? Does it?



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