Author’s Note: This column was originally started on September 7 and completed today. I was in the hospital last week for surgery and simply didn’t have enough time or energy to complete the column as planned. Apologies aside, I hope you’ll enjoy it.
There I was, Labor Day... A day where I could sit back and write about any number of topics on baseball (hmmm... Already wrote a column last week on the pennant races) or football (hmmm... I can do that next week. There are a few topics I’m not mentally ready to write about, particularly yesterday’s passing of former Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end, and teammate, Lee Roy Selmon). No... I have something more interesting and less emotionally draining to write about today... Today’s column will focus on stupidity.
(Assumed Editorial Feedback: Oh Dave, don’t you find a way to write about stupidity in almost every column?)
Well, maybe I do take advantage of opportunities and consistently try to teach one little lesson about the unwritten commandment Thou shalt not be a moron, but today is a special opportunity because it coincides with the start of a new academic year for our elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities, so, since it’s my column I’ll set the theme, and our theme for today is stupidity.
Well, maybe not stupidity as much as ignorance... Nope, stupidity is the appropriate theme, I’ve made up my mind, and as you read along, I’m sure you’ll appreciate how and why I came to the conclusion that stupidity is the right theme for this Labor Day column.
Before I dive into today’s story, I’d like to point out that I do take my columns seriously, even though I don’t earn any income writing them. As much as a blog column could be a vehicle for venting, I try to put as much substance as possible into my thoughts, because: (1) I’ll always be a teacher at my core, so I feel the need to teach something, or at least give readers something to think about in each column, (2) each column is potentially the core of a chapter for another book project, and (3) I don’t want to simply write a bunch of silly nonsense when my columns are distributed to approximately 5,000 people via email, Twitter, Linked-In and other social media modes. Besides, if I expect such a sizeable number of people to consistently and regularly read what I write, the least I can do is write like I’ve put significant thought behind my words.
So, here’s today’s story for our amusement and reflection...
Today I decided to take a drive to the grocery store in order to stock up on some basic food staples for the next week or two. I happen to be scheduled for a full day of medical tests on Thursday and outpatient surgery on Friday, and I know I won’t have the time or physical strength to run errands beforehand or afterwards, so today’s errand was a practical necessity, no different from how residents of the east coast recently prepared for Hurricane Irene, but with far less hysteria.
For those who know me well, I hate grocery shopping more than any domestic chore a human being must do, and this hatred for grocery shopping (make that all shopping) has continuously increased over the years since my spinal injury simply because it’s a lot of strain on my spine and legs. Even if I was a completely healthy person, I’d still consider grocery shopping tedious and far too time-consuming compared to the hours I could invest in other activities. In fact, there have been times when I’ve been completely traumatized by shopping, especially the day before a major holiday, religious or secular. Crowds are not my thing, especially crowds that grab around and over you, shoving anyone in sight all in the name of procuring that final jar of salsa during a 2-for-1 sale. In this era of coupons and manager specials, shopping is clearly a contact sport requiring helmets and other protective padding when large numbers of maniacs race up and down store isles with shopping carts and then behave similarly with their automobiles in the parking lot. Not a day goes by that I don’t pine for the days when I was young and healthy and could do my grocery shopping at 2:00am when 24-hour stores were nearly empty of people to interfere with me as I tackled this chore with quiet efficiency.
However, this column has little to do with the physical or even mental toll grocery shopping takes out of me, because those consequences will always be a part of my life no matter what day of the week, month or year I’m in a store. This column actually has to do with the aftermath of shopping.
What’s the aftermath, you ask? Ah... This takes place after you’ve completed filling your shopping cart, found a cashier lane moving at a “faster than molasses” pace, load your groceries onto the conveyer belt, hand over your frequent shopper savings card and coupons to the cashier, bag your own groceries (since another employee is rarely available for that duty and your cashier is really just the cashier, analogous to the “I don’t do windows” mentality), and pay your bill. The aftermath is when (or possibly if) you move aside with your shopping cart and inspect your receipt prior to leaving the store. I happen to be someone who scans over my receipt immediately after I leave the cashier lane, simply because I know errors happen. If I’m quick enough I can catch the error while the cashier is scanning the items and have the cashier back up and double-check a price, but today wasn’t such a day.
Anyway, while scanning today’s receipt I noticed an error at the very top; it was the only error. I needed bread (among a few other items on sale at this particular grocery store, Stop and Shop). Hey, sometimes toast or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is all I’m in the mood to eat, so why not be prepared in case that’s all I feel like eating after surgery? It just so happens that Arnold-brand breads were on sale -- buy one and get one free of equal or lesser value.
I happen to be a very picky person when it comes to bread. I like bread with oomph, bread with substance, fiber — give me a good chewy rye bread or something with whole wheat or multigrain. You’ll never satisfy me with plain ol’ white bread, and the same goes for rolls, pita breads or wraps. I love my carbohydrates as much as anyone else, but at least give me enjoyable healthy carbohydrates. Oh, and if the bread has seeds I’m in heaven, even if the seeds get stuck in my partials. Seeds simply reinforce the oomph in the bread’s taste.
I luckily found two different loaves of Arnold breads that met my criteria, so I bought one loaf called “healthy grain whole wheat” and one loaf of “whole wheat 12-grain”. Each loaf costs $4.49, so we’re not talking cheap bread here. For $4.49, I could drive over to Whole Foods and buy a loaf of bread to die for, but I’m neither the richest person on the planet nor was I up to driving an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods, so two loaves of healthy Arnold bread at Stop and Shop for the same price would have to do, because you can’t just drive an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods for one loaf of bread. Shopping at Whole Foods is like those Lays Potato Chips commercials, where you can’t stop at one. If I’m going to Whole Foods, I have a significant shopping list written down to buy a bunch of food I love to eat but wish I had the budget for.
So, there I was, in Stop and Shop, receipt in hand, noticing an error. For some reason, the cash register’s computer (You have to blame it on the computer, because cashiers are simply humans scanning items with barcodes for a computer to read and provide a corresponding price. Cashiers really don’t think about what they’re scanning.) charged me for two loaves; it didn’t give me one for free. Hey, these errors happen, probably more often than we think, so I wobbled over to customer service with my shopping cart (no, I don’t really walk with my cane anymore; I wobble), showed the young lady at the counter my receipt, the Stop and Shop circular with the advertised sale for Arnold-brand breads, and the two loaves of Arnold-brand bread I bought, and explained that I shouldn’t be charged for both loaves. When you’re a reasonably logical adult, you figure this is more than sufficient information to provide someone at the customer service counter.
The problem is that the person on the other side of the customer service counter may not be as logical as you or me, and the young lady (let’s call her “Juliette”) working the customer service counter at my local Stop and Shop clearly had some logical limitations. The first thing Juliette did was randomly flip through all the pages of the circular — the very circular I handed her with the Arnold-brand bread sale ad front and center — and say, “are we even having a bread sale? I don’t see anything here.” I had to instruct Juliette to fold up the circular exactly how it was handed to her. Finally Juliette saw the ad. Juliette then carefully stared at the ad, looked up at me, and said, “you bought the wrong bread. The ad is only for 24-ounce breads.”
I now share with you the size information on each package of bread: “1 LB, 8 oz (680 g).”
I told Juliette these were 24-ounce breads (please forgive my butchered grammar... I do mean “24-ounce packages of bread”), and this is when things went downhill for Juliette...
“No-uh, you bought 8-ounce breads. It says right there.”
The package says one-pound and 8 ounces. That’s 24 ounces.
“No-uh, 1 pound is 8 ounces.”
Did you just say 1 pound is 8 ounces? How many ounces are in one pound?
“Eight. The bread says so.”
There are 16 ounces in one pound. 16 plus 8 equals 24 ounces.
“I don’t need your math lesson and attitude to know I’m right. That’s a 1-pound bread that’s 8 ounces.”
As I was just about to ask to speak to the store manager Juliette inexplicably took the two packages of Arnold bread and scanned them into her register. Sure enough, both packages registered as “Arnold Bread 24oz, $4.49”, and just like that, she opened up her cash drawer and counted out the cash owed back to me... $4.44... Yes, $4.44... Four single-dollar bills, one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies. Apparently the combination of quarters, dimes and nickels was too much to process for Juliette. This required the manager’s attention, which is another story for another column if I dare revisiting the topic.
Some of you might be wondering, what’s the big deal? You eventually got your correct refund. Yes, perhaps I eventually did, but the educator in me found the whole experience quite disturbing. Here’s a young lady, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years old. Perhaps she’s a recent high school graduate. Perhaps she’s a local college student. Perhaps she doesn’t attend school at all and is a full-time employee of Stop and Shop. But here’s a young adult who cannot figure out that “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, because she doesn’t know how to read a package of bread, because she doesn’t understand basic units of measurement we expect fifth graders to comprehend for the purpose of high-stakes standardized testing. I’m wiling to bet she still doesn’t believe “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, but she blindly trusts what the cash register tells her when she scans the package’s UPC bar code. I can only imagine how much longer I would’ve been standing at the customer service counter if her register didn’t identify the bread package weights. One would think that since each package cost $4.49 on my receipt and the circular ad explicitly stated that the price of one package without your shopping discount card was $4.49 this would be sufficient information for Juliette, but it wasn’t. Worst of all, Juliette “didn’t need math” to know she was right, even though she was indeed wrong.
This, to me, was scarier than Juliette’s ignorance of basic measurement units. As I’ve written for many years in academic journals and book chapters, adults generally have four amorphous stages of cognitive development, according to the research and theory of former Harvard psychologist William G. Perry: dualism, multiplicity, skepticism and relativism. As we encounter more experience in life, within and outside academic settings, we’re supposed to evolve towards more open-minded thinking. As researchers of the 1980s and 1990s have shown, the overwhelming majority of college graduates are essentially as narrow-minded and myopically-thinking as they were when first coming to college. What this means is that if you’re an ignorant, closed-minded blockhead at 17 or 18 years old, chances are you’re going to be the same intellectually-stunted person at 22 or 23 years old, if not older, no matter who you are, what you’ve earned a degree in, how many academic degrees you’ve earned, or where you’ve earned those degrees from. I interpret that to mean bigots and racists will likely remain bigots and racists because it takes a LOT of years to overcome your upbringing and foundation, and the same can be said for many of the negative attributes associated with a broad spectrum of American society: laziness, ignorance, functional stupidity, vanity, lack of empathy for your fellow person, etc. This is supposedly why we’re supposed to care so much about our educational system, so we can “slap to stupid” out of America’s youth before it becomes too entrenched, no matter who a child is or where that child lives. As we well see in adult society, American education hasn’t managed to land a finger, much less slap stupidity out of kids’ heads, for generations. All we need to do is open a newspaper or watch any number of television shows to see adult society has more than its share of stupidity.
Are we all capable of stupidity? Of COURSE we are! This includes you, me and everyone else who reads or doesn’t read my columns. We all do stupid (or “dumb” for those with a personal stigma about the word “stupid”) things from time to time, but we’re capable of recognizing our actions or words and rectifying the consequences as best as we can. Those stupid things we do are part of the learning experience, whether we’re organizing a monthly budget, cooking a particular meal for the first time, fixing a car, planning a party, performing a chemical experiment, solving a word problem, or quarterbacking a football game (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo). The goal is to recognize, diagnose and correct our mistakes so we can avoid repeating them, or at least minimizing the times of repetition (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo).
There are, however, people who don’t operate the same way we try to, because they simply can’t recognize the possibility of being fallible, and you don’t need to be in a position of power to belong in this category (see former President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney). Many years ago, 1998 to be exact, I started writing about a phenomenon I coined “cognitive capitulation.” For those new to this term, I viewed cognitive capitulators as Perry’s theory in reverse, where people could actually become more narrow-minded and less-capable of reasoning beyond one’s reference point. Back then I used to get regularly attacked by snarky graduate students who would say, “so, you want me to get outside my box and simply surrender to your way of thinking instead? I’ll show you, and remain at peace with a view I accept without outside challenge.” If you’ve read the entire homogenized quote you see how these graduate students validated my theory. I never asked anyone to “buy” what I’m selling (well, aside from the books I’ve written...); I ask people to be open-minded enough to listen to what I have to say, just like I’ve had to spend thirty years listening politely to what THEY have to say. Whether we agree with each other is irrelevant; the point is to be cognizant and respectful of our views. When we can’t do that, we become pawns of a mob mentality, defending a dominant paradigm to the proverbial death all in the name of preventing the other side from being heard.
If I told you the citizens of 1930s Germany and Italy were cognitive capitulators to Hitler and Mussolini, you’d likely see merit in that thought. If I told you members of today’s Tea Party are cognitive capitulators to people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, you might feel less comfortable with the thought but you might still give it a bit of merit. If I told you that educators of the past 30-40 years are cognitive capitulators to whatever is the new mode of political expedience by people who’ve never been in a classroom, your response might depend on how supportive you are of teacher unions, or your biases about schools and American society. If I told you that today’s chemistry professors are cognitive capitulators to yesterday’s chemistry professors, you might take great offense, because a chemistry professor is supposedly someone of high intellectual integrity and independence. Really? Ever heard of tenure committees?
So what’s your response if I tell you that Juliette’s a cognitive capitulator? Do you agree with me, possibly because a young lady who can’t decipher pounds and ounces was absolutely sure she was right, I was wrong, and math was irrelevant to the conflict resolution? Or, do you disagree with me, possibly because Juliette doesn’t possess enough knowledge to think in the first place?
Where do we draw the line at debating the place of thinking in society? Does thinking only apply to certain age levels and settings in society, or should thinking be a universal concern? Is insistence of “being right” or having “the right way” of doing things only relevant to mature adults and highly-educated members of society, or possessors of supreme power? I can go on and on with this debate, but the bottom line is when do individuals come to terms with the possibility they just might be wrong on something and it’s time to shut up and listen to someone perhaps more knowledgeable, regardless of age, academic credentials, race, ethnicity, gender, or power status in society? For more than thirty years I’ve routinely wondered when exactly my ideas have merit, or more precisely: when do I finally earn the respect of any human being for the simple courtesy of allowing me to calmly demonstrate that I know what the hell I’m talking about, be it about chemistry, physics, science education, football, or buying a lousy loaf of bread?
As embarrassed as I am to say it, I had a momentary urge to “slap the stupid” out of Juliette and tell her in front of anyone and everyone at Stop and Shop: You stupid kid! Is there any little warning light in your head telling you to shut up and listen to somebody more than twice your age, who actually grew up in an era BEFORE the metric system, much less computerized cash registers?! I don’t know about you, but I take great offense having to deal with people less knowledgeable than me who are UNWILLING to defer to my level of knowledge, and that’s pretty sad considering we’re talking about a trivial 24-ounce package of bread. This is hardly deciphering the New England Patriots no-huddle offense or quantum mechanics.
This is supposed to be America’s future, folks — the next generation of citizens for a rapidly changing information age, or what former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney calls a “Smart Phone Society.” If Juliette is an example of Romney’s “Smart Phone Society”, I hope Juliette’s smart phone can do the mother load of Juliette’s thinking, because I’m skeptical that she or many of her peers can think independently of automated machines. If you think I’m getting ahead of myself, keep in mind that young people like Juliette will be the continuous faces shown during the next fourteen months leading up to the 2012 presidential election as our economy remains mired in double-digit unemployment rates for most segments of America. Imagine the possible (I’m too cynical about our government and the US Congress to say words like “eventual”) passing of a Jobs Bill and employers pointing to people like Juliette as a primary reason why unemployment still cannot be reduced, claiming “you can’t hire dummies who can’t work with the most basic of knowledge.”
Now, people like Juliette are hardly unique. We’ve all encountered our share of cashiers and store clerks who can’t count change or perform the most basic of math operations without profound difficulty, and I probably wouldn’t even dwell on it so much if I hadn’t recently seen an HBO special showing “The best of ‘Hard Knocks’”, a compilation of ten years of candid camera moments from NFL training camps. If you haven’t seen this “Hard Knocks” retrospective, there’s one scene from the New York Jets training camp last summer where one assistant coach offers another a question (I’m paraphrasing it) from the Jeff Foxworthy show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” -- [A child] is holding two yard sticks and a 12-inch ruler. How many feet does that equal?
Needless to say, the second Jets assistant coach could not correctly answer the question, that the child is holding seven feet of measuring sticks. Why? Because he neither understood how many feet were in a yard nor how many inches were in a foot, and football is supposedly a game of inches, feet and yards! This is considered entertainment by HBO. I consider it embarrassing that my favorite NFL team still employs an assistant coach who can’t do fifth grade math.
We can test children and young adults until the cows come home in our schools and colleges and the simple truth is that those tests will never tell us whether children or young adults genuinely learned anything or understand what educational administrators and political leaders expect these citizens to know. Chances are this Jets assistant coach scored sufficiently enough on standardized tests to get through our educational systems and find employment in the NFL. Chances are Juliette scored just as sufficiently on whatever tests she had to take during her formal education and now she works for a moderately large grocery chain like Stop and Shop. Yet neither comprehend fundamental math knowledge our nation arbitrarily considers a benchmark for being a literate citizen, and that’s rather disturbing.
So what’s the take-home lesson or punch-line to this story? In a nation still muddling through a major recession, price inflation, stagnant wages, and double-digit unemployment for people lacking at least a bachelors degree, we have politicians and political pundits all screaming about job creation, but where’s the guarantee that all these new jobs can be filled by knowledgeable and capable people? If a better-paying opportunity becomes available for people like Juliette, will they really be qualified for these opportunities? If the New York Jets suddenly fire this one assistant coach and he needs to find new employment outside of football, will there be enough jobs he’s qualified for, or will he be limited by his inability to comprehend elementary school-level math? Worse, how do we know that one day we won’t turn on the six-o’clock news one evening and hear that Juliette didn’t poison her child because she didn’t know how to properly measure the correct dosage of medicine prescribed by a pediatrician? Don’t call me an alarmist, because we’ve all heard of at least one story over the past decade or two where parents improperly administered medication to a child because they either couldn’t read the directions on the package or measure out the medicine.
Everyone makes mistakes, just as everyone is capable of having a brain freeze. Even I’ve made calculation mistakes over the years, and the mistakes have become more frequent as I’ve gotten older. But I take my mistakes to heart; I take my mistakes seriously. That’s because I take knowledge seriously. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many citizens of Governor Romney’s “Smart Phone Society.” How many times have we heard young people (or not so young people) say there’s no need to remember certain things, because they can look it up on a computer?
What if a computer’s unavailable, like many were during Hurricane Irene, because tens of thousands of citizens were without electricity? What do you do then? Stop taking or administering medication on account of darkness? Declare a moratorium on measuring? That may be acceptable when it comes to portion control of your favorite comfort food during a blackout, but not when it comes to medication or something of equal importance.
I know... It was just a loaf of bread, but the loaf of bread is merely an example of an underlying problem with our educational system, especially when our educational system keeps emphasizing literacy and standardized testing of the basics, including mathematics. The underlying problem, folks, is that our educational system continues to fail at inspiring educators, administrators and learners to give a damn about knowledge in general. If it ain’t on the state or national test, it don’t matter. I actually wrote about this academic philosophy expressed by a veteran high school social studies teacher of the New York City public school system in my 2001 book Teacher training: A reference handbook. If there’s not high-stakes test or grade attached to information it’s simply white noise, as disposable a commodity as the six-pack of paper towels we all likely have on our typical grocery shopping lists. We teach knowledge and we test knowledge, but we really don’t care much about knowledge, simply because we don’t fully understand what knowledge is in the first place.
In my new book, Philosophy of “Packer” pedagogy I present a vision of what a critically-thinking and problem-solving literate society can be in terms of Vince Lombardi’s four core principals of teaching and learning. Lombardi’s fourth principal was “winning isn’t a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing.” I upgraded principal this to state: thinking and the effort to learn is (sic: are) not a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing. In other words, using your brain shouldn’t be an occasional luxury; it should be a daily endeavor. But we don’t have a dominant culture or society that advocates this principal beyond artificial academic assessment? How many times have we heard parents encourage or demand their children to “get good grades” as the daily objective of school. Just once, couldn’t parents encourage or demand their children demonstrate evidence of thinking, or even offer the advice don’t do anything stupid today?
As a parting thought, many of us have heard the saying “don’t argue with an idiot; no one will recognize the difference.” There’s considerable merit to that saying. Unfortunately, as you and I go through our daily lives, the sad truth is that the idiots in society tend to own the megaphones and airwaves, and we’re inundated with their oppressive droning. Ask yourself when’s the last time you were able to listen to a calm voice of reason that didn’t exist solely inside your head? Maybe it’s time we all got a little pissed off, mouthed off and slapped the stupid out of some folks. Who knows? We’ve may stun these nitwits into the silence we crave.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new Book! Don’t buy it because I’m “right” -- Buy it because I have something worthwhile to say and think about.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
