Friday, December 4, 1998
Mind must filter knowledge
EDUCATION: Examine value of messages that constantly bombard
us
For people like me, finals are a time for over-caffeinated,
pajama-clad, 14-hour cram sessions interspersed with brief moments
of insanity. You see, I am one of those students who (I hope none
of my professors are reading this) opts to do absolutely none of
the assigned work for five weeks straight.
I allow my work to pile up until the day or two before the exam.
Then I commit myself to the dark recesses of my bedroom to read for
more hours than I can count. Fueled by Pepsi and Cheerios, I chug
through hundreds of pages until all irrelevant information,
including my own name, has been pushed out to make room for my
newly acquired knowledge.
And I’ll tell you the scary part – these late night sessions
actually work. I have a keen aptitude for memorization, and it is
too difficult not to exploit that gift. I’m not complaining, but it
is a little disturbing that memorization and regurgitation have
carried me successfully through an esteemed university like UCLA
thus far.
I do not think I am alone in this, because isn’t that basically
what we all do, in one way or another, in our quests through this
zany world of academia? Maybe graduate school is different.
For those of you undergrads reading this, I am curious to know
how often you have had to think for yourself. I mean really think.
When you sit down to write papers, don’t you already know what the
professor wants you to say, since you have already been told in one
way or another? (That is, if you have actually attended lecture
lately.)
Odds are, if you are assigned to write a paper about World War
II, you won’t get very far with a thesis asserting that the entire
battle was a result of Adolf Hitler’s fear of abandonment and
Benito Mussolini’s Oedipus complex. There just isn’t much room for
anything other than superficial debate in the scholastic world; the
history book is gospel, and those who wrote it are the divine
creators who shape and mold reality for coming generations.
Have you ever worried that you have been floating through life,
just memorizing what you have read and heard? Sure, in certain
mindsets conducive to pseudo-philosophizing, I have convinced
myself that I have uncovered novel truths, which the thought police
had been trying to hide from me. But in retrospect the morning
after (and maybe it is because of the dulling hangover I am
sporting), those pages of scribble retaining my previous night’s
work of genius no longer glow with the profundity I originally
thought they would. Then again, once in a while, a ray of light
pierces through the nebulous clusters of vowels and consonants
scrawled onto those sheets of paper, causing me to stop and say to
myself, "Hey, I’m pretty smart." (No Mom, I do not get drunk that
often.)
You know that whole doctrine of the ’60s: Drugs equal creations
of genius.
Consider for a second that maybe there is something to this. And
maybe there is also someone out there who does not want us to know
there may be some benefits to drug use. Now, calm down, I admit
that there are absolutely no advantages to drug "abuse," but I am
talking about drug "use."
So, how come we rarely hear that Sigmund Freud was a cokehead?
And then there was Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and a long list
of talented musical artists who owe credit for their masterpieces
to firewater. (Yes, alcohol is a drug too.) And I am sure there are
plenty more upstanding historical figures who have also
participated in such mind-altering practices. Then there are those
religions, like that of the Native American Church, which have
evolved successfully around a premise similar to this
mentality.
As we grow up, we are given a cluster of choices, and we are
told to believe that those are our only choices. But are they?
Maybe drugs are the only consistently successful means mankind has
found to allow thoughts, other than those societally approved
square pegs, to creep into our minds.
Let me remind you that I am not necessarily advocating drug use.
And please, please do not get your step stools out to mount a
soapbox, before you allow me to stipulate that in no way do I
believe that drug use is the only means available for
free-thinking. I am merely attempting to exercise in this
discussion the quasi-freedom of thought, which each one of us was
(supposedly) promised at this country’s inception.
Perhaps the way our society treats and acquires knowledge comes
from the fact that people do not want to spend their lives
re-examining everything. "Question everything" we are told, but
those who tell us this just don’t appeal to most people. Zealots
aren’t on anyone’s Christmas card list.
But at the same time, it is those free thinkers who defied the
odds who are remembered, championed and loved by our society. They
are the ones who have moved the human civilization forward. Yet
they are the ones whom the status quo has often tried to silence
and suppress.
So back to the original question: Who, if any of us, is really
capable of free thinking? The world is so subjective – we have our
own convictions, but are they ever truly our own? Or are they just
molded by the powers that be?
Consider living in a less enlightened time; you would not have
challenged social constructs like racism, sexism or classism. Take
slavery, for instance. We would like to think we are incapable of
such ignorance, that we would have dared to doubt the status quo.
But do we know how we would have reacted in that environment?
I guess none of us will ever know for sure. But we can hope, and
we can be vigilant in what we allow into our subconscious. Today
there are legions of messages and ideas bombarding our eyes and
ears. It is now more important than ever to filter those ideas
through our own sets of criteria and judgement.
We need to take active roles in our acquisition of knowledge and
to never stop questioning and re-examining that knowledge. It is
crucial that we be weary of those schools of thought which recruit
believers by convincing us that they possess the only truth in the
universe.
Those may be the only tools available to help us through our
quests, but it is a start that has taken years of struggle to
become available. But now you will have to excuse me, I have a
final coming up, and I hear the haunting voices of about nine
chapters and a highlighter calling my name.
Catie Snow Bailard
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