Spencer Heath Archive

Item 626

Typed notes by Heath on three 6-hole, small ring-binder pages evidently quoting an article by Gregory Zilboorg in the Atlantic Monthly, pages 728-729.

June 1937

 

 

 

Pages 728-729

 

     It is infinitely more difficult to dispel man’s ignorance than to impart knowledge.

 

If human ignorance consisted simply in a lack of information, our task as educators would be reduced to reciting clear-cut statements of fact which the ignorant would then learn, accept, and use. This is evidently not the case. What actually characterizes the process of educa­tion is a double procedure: first, we dispel the ‘knowing so many things that ain’t so,’ and then, if this task be successfully completed, we embark upon the relatively simple business of imparting the new information. Frequently we encounter so many difficulties at the first stage that little or no time, strength or opportunity is left for the second, and the battle for enlightenment is then temporarily lost or its victory postponed. History, always generous on this score, offers us a number of illustrations. …

 

Why all this? Obviously not because the contemporaries of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, or Galileo lacked the necessary information, but because they knew so many things that weren’t so. …

It would be a mistake to dispose of this problem by saying that it is all a matter of the past. …  For without the red of the official fires, and without the scarlet of blood spilled for scientific discovery, ignorance is still as strangely persistent in modern times as it was ages ago.     

Page 729

   Man has seldom found objection to the production of new practical and seemingly useful things, be it a new drug with which ‘to poison out disease as we smoke out vermin’(the words are Oliver Wendell Holmes’s), a new vehicle, a new tool of destruction, or a new shoe-polishing gadget, but he seems always to have been bent on defending his ignorance by means of logic against the enlightenment which the dis­covery of scientific facts carries in its wake. Francis Bacon apparently had this in mind when he objected to the ‘fructiferous’ trends in science taking priority over the ‘luminiferous’ones, which latter were and always are threatened with assassination by the hired man of the human mind — traditional logic.