People with too much knowledge to ever read a book and why we keep on rewarding mediocrity

One of my pet peeves in talking to other people about books and knowledge is when I find myself dealing with someone who claims a little (or a lot of) knowledge about a subject in which they really know nothing. It usually starts when I'm talking about a particular book, and the person I'm talking to will discount pretty much everything I say and then interject with "common knowledge" about a subject of which he or she has no knowledge nor is the subject all that common. Take educations as a subject. I was having a conversation with someone about teaching in high schools and community colleges. The person I was talking to went on a rant about how he knew so much about the subject because he had an aunt that was a teacher, and boy, could he tell me stories. I remembered conversations I had with other person who used their knowledge of having been in high school once to pass on their "brilliant" insights about teaching at high schools. This reminded me of a book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrificies and Small Salaries of America's Teachers by Daniel Moultrop, Ninive Clements Calegari and Dave Eggars. It's one of those books with brilliant insights and exhaustive research, but every time I brought it up in conversation, I was rebuked by someone who had "better" information, and would never, ever, in a million years, read that book because they already knew everything they needed to know about the subject.

I used to run into this type of attitude while in graduate school. A student would respond to a conversation about a book with a diatribe on the subject, but not once would actual evidence ever be brought up. I even had one student talk about a movie she saw on the weekend as "evidence" once. Such conversations become very tiring, very fast, and people often wonder why I've come this close to giving up on the institutions of education these days.

An interesting area of study is that of ethnic and racial studies because the area is filled with such misinformation based on stereotypes and beliefs fueled by race politics. I was in a course that was studying poverty once when the students each went off on a rant about their knowledge of poverty based on personal experiences ("I was an undergraduate who once could not afford to buy a CD for months because of how little money I was making from financial aid" as the type of example). I'm not a real fan of comparative studies as a process of explanation, but having been through poverty, such circumstances really irritated me when it was politically incorrect to stand up and say: "You don't know anything about poverty because you've NEVER BEEN POOR!"

But when it comes to studying race, it's a very interesting dilemma because there are so many people in higher levels of education who rely on their race as their only foundation for their level of scholarship. I remember an African-American woman in one of my classes who received no small amount of scholarships and endowments, mainly because she signed her name to forms stating that she was African-American. I think I was one of the only other graduate students to read what she was writing (something she made a habit of keeping from other students), and I was astounded at how little research she conducted nor how her "conclusions" consisted of making some of the weakest arguments I'd ever experienced. Had I ever submitted anything like I read from the several awarded papers she had written, I would have received a red comment on the paper from a professor stating, "yeah, but who cares?" But the interesting thing is that there was no way in the world anyone would ever DARE say that out loud back then, because not only was it important to award everything you could to someone who was doing no work whatsoever in her educational process, it would have been career suicide to have even hinted that one suspected the work of being as weak as it really was. This person went onto achieve a PhD in her field, and in my many conversations with her over the years, I came to realize this whole pursuit was really a walk in the park for her, because no one ever challenged her, nor did anyone ever put her through any length of criticism for producing nothing but shoddy work. That, in a nutshell, is one of the serious problems with our educational system these days.

Which brings me back to lazy research and those who refuse to engage themselves in exploring deeper analysis. There's an interesting book that few people have read but many have seen called The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridon Prasso. In this book, the author explores western stereotypes that we keep reinforcing over and over again. Having been someone who has been swept up in the same stereotypes myself (an infatuation with Lucy Liu when she first appeared), it helped to understand why such things affect the psyche. When talking the book over with others, most people just don't get it, and when I've tried to explain it to people, I discover it's not their ability to understand it that's the problem but it's their perspective about Asia, Asian people and other such matters that make it almost impossible to explain. Until you read it yourself, you really don't understand, but getting someone to read it is like pulling teeth with pliars. It just doesn't happen.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Unfortunately, getting people to read is never an easy process, and I'm almost to the point where I'm giving up on trying. If people want to be considered experts on subjects they know nothing about, let them. I'll just smile knowingly and laugh behind their backs instead.

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