Everyone is ignorant about something. Alright, I’ll go first. If a sportscaster reported “The results of an exciting cricket match just in: the Mudflats got five wickets over the Airfoils,” I can’t really tell whether that is good or bad or which wick is stickiest. If you were to ask, “Do all female kangaroo rats have pouches?” I would either have to take a wild guess or admit that I don’t know. (That question, though, has an interesting form that I use a lot.) I admit it: my knowledge is limited. Very limited.

It’s impossible to know everything about everything. There’s only so much room in the pail of our memories and soon it overflows. As we evolved there was a benefit to knowing just enough to get through the day: we had enough to shuffle along hunting, gathering, eating, drinking, loving and sleeping. Oh, yes, also fighting for our existence.

Things got a bit better when families formed tribes. The gene pool was a lot bigger. However, we now had to remember a lot more names and who was related to whom. We had to learn to work as a team to hunt bigger prey and gather larger roots and berries. The pail wasn’t any bigger but we needed to know more.

Tribes became clans; clans became villages; villages became cities; cities became states which became nations and here we are today. Each step required us to fill the memory pail with more specifics just to get along. To do this each of us became a specialist. Yes, we had to remember family and the boundaries of our property, but we didn’t have to know how to do everything needed to get through the day. We were farmers, or hunters, or bakers, accountants, or nuclear physicists. We could buy the necessities from specialists: bread from the baker, tax returns from accountants, and atoms from the physicist.

That simplified things a lot, but it also made it easier not to know. And that is a huge problem. In a recent edition of Newsweek (March 28 & April 4, 2011), there was a large section on ignorance. Before going there, let’s address what it is.
Ignorance is the absence of knowledge about something. It may be unintentional, such as who the driver is in that approaching truck, or the last name of the clerk in the store with the name tag Flo. This sort of ignorance is usually harmless. Intentional ignorance comes in several varieties. If I am a baker I don’t have to know anything about nuclear physics; it doesn’t relate to baking. If I am a nuclear physicist I don’t have to know anything about baking. In either case, I don’t want to fill my memory pail with information I don’t need. If I wanted to know I could Google it. This, too, is pretty harmless. However, if I insulate my knowledge in order to maintain my preconceived notions, I could very well do harm to myself or to an innocent other.

The Newsweek articles ask “Are Americans smart enough to be U.S. citizens.” A thousand Americans were asked selected questions from the bank of questions used to test immigrants wishing to become citizens. Number 23 is “What is the economic system of the United States?” 67% of those questioned got it wrong! I have to admit I got one wrong along with 86% of the rest: “The House of Representatives has how many voting members?” My answer, “Too many,” should have been 435.
New citizens have to pass a test to get in. In high school, civics was a required course, so I managed to squeak through here, as did 62% of those tested for the articles. That means 38% of our fellow Americans know less about America than naturalized citizens.

There is only one known cure for ignorance. Knowledge, a real understanding of things vital to the well being of this country. There can be no excuse for ignorance of how our country’s government works, other than incapacity. Be knowledgeable enough to keep the politicians from pulling the wool over your memory pail.