In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria

Author:Fareed Zakaria [Zakaria, Fareed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

*All spellings and capitalization in writings by the founding fathers have been modernized where necessary.

† At the time, advocates of education, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson included, thought it fitting only for young white men.

5

Knowledge and Power

IF IGNORANCE IS bliss, why do people want knowledge? This is a question with a long pedigree in Western culture. Prometheus brought fire from Mount Olympus down to earth and its mortal inhabitants. In doing so, he enraged Zeus, the supreme deity, who had him chained to a rock and tortured for eternity by an eagle feasting on his liver. And that was just the punishment for Prometheus. Human beings were sent a curse in the form of Pandora, with her box of ills that would afflict humankind forever once it was unlocked—disease, sickness, sorrow, envy, hatred.

Prometheus’s fire may have been a metaphor for knowledge. In Aeschylus’s version of the legend, in addition to the burning branch, Prometheus introduced humans to the arts, including writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and medicine. In other words, Prometheus decided to bring a liberal arts curriculum down from the heavens—and he and all of humankind paid a dreadful price for it.

So did Adam and Eve. The story at the heart of biblical history is about the dangers of knowledge. According to Genesis, there were many trees in the Garden of Eden, but only two had names: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. God forbade Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the latter, warning that if they did, they would die.* The serpent, representing Satan, told the couple not to be timid, assuring them that eating the fruit would not result in death. God didn’t want them to eat it, the serpent told Eve, because if they did, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”

So Adam and Eve plucked the fruit and ate it. When God realized what they had done, he was merciless in his punishment. He told Eve, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception,” and then condemned women for eternity to the pains of childbirth. He told Adam, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” And, of course, he banished them from the Garden of Eden. In other words, human beings came to earth as fallen creatures, born in original sin, because they desired knowledge.

This notion that knowledge is dangerous has recurred in Western thought for millennia. Given that the West has made such great strides in its understanding of the universe, it is interesting to note that non-Western cultures do not have equivalent myths about the perils of learning. There are some similar stories in other civilizations, but nothing with the import of the tale of Prometheus or the biblical fall of man. Perhaps it is because the West has been so persistently inquisitive that it has also been fearful of the consequences of its curiosity.

The phrase “ignorance

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