The Blessings of Ignorance

I didn't know how dumb I was. And boy, am I glad I didn't.

This is the last of a set of education posts from “Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Everyday Life in the Late American Empire,” this one a little more personal. —Jim

Vehicle of mobility: An aquamarine Chevy Biscayne

“Mom, will I go to college?”

Spring, 1973. I was ten years old. I don’t remember what prompted the question. My sister and I were in the back seat, my parents in front, of our faded aquamarine Chevy Biscayne, the latest in a string of used cars we used up in a childhood that included a 1966 Chevy Corvair (a vehicle that had been dubbed “unsafe at any speed” the previous year) and an impressively powerful 1967 Ford Fairlane, a car developed earlier in the decade by executive Robert McNamara, who was running an unsuccessful imperial war in Vietnam by then. My sister and I were in the throes of a numbing search for our first (and only) family house; we were outside the one my parents would ultimately buy with the help of a couple thousand borrowed dollars from the savings of my paternal grandmother. It had good public schools, which was largely the point of this enterprise. Lifelong renters, my parents didn’t particularly want to own a home. They wanted their children in a good school system. This was how you did that.

“Of course you’ll go to college,” my mother replied.

“Doesn’t it cost a lot of money to go to college?”

“We won’t have to pay. You’ll get a scholarship.”

“Isn’t that for football players?”

“They give scholarships if you’re smart.”

“Really? Someone will pay for your college just because you’re smart?”

“Sure,” my dad said.

This was interesting information. But what was even more interesting at the time—and what has increasingly dazzled me in the decades since—was my parents’ utterly serene confidence about my college prospects. All the more so, since neither of them had gone to college themselves. Maybe that was the reason for that confidence—maybe they too were innocents back then. In any case, their prophecy proved correct: I did receive a scholarship to go to college (and to go to graduate school, too), and my sister graduated from an Ivy League university. There were any number of things that didn’t go as expected for them, or for my sister. But their aim was true as far as my schooling went. It became the basis of everything good that followed in my life.

I don’t remember being conscious of any of these imperatives as such during my own childhood. Actually, I don’t recall being conscious of much of anything during the elementary years of my schooling beyond an unquestioned, unthinking desire to master the tasks that were put before me. I had to be responding to some degree to external stimuli, principal among them the approbation of my parents and teachers. But as I look back on it now, I believe I acted on something more primal than that, something I don’t think I can really take credit or responsibility for. Wanting to be good at school amounted to little more than an urge. Fortunately for me, the environmental conditions at hand fostered and rewarded those urges, creating a positive, if primitive, feedback loop.  I wanted to be a good student, was told I was a good student, and wanted to be even better.

I know it didn’t go like this for everybody. But I also know that I was not, and am not, unique, either. (I’ll bet my bottom dollar that at this very moment, in the Queens neighborhood where I was born, some Latino or South Asian parents are scheming just like my white ethnic parents did.) I sense the same urges in some of the students I teach today. Factors like race and class affect this drive I’m describing, though I don’t believe they determine it. I will note that I sense it most often and palpably in girls. I’m not sure why.

In a peculiar way, I was a beneficiary of my limits. Lessons or camps were out of the question: I never seriously considered, or rued, their absence in my life. I do remember wishing I could join a bona fide Little League baseball team, with real uniforms, instead of the substandard rec league in which I played for a couple of seasons. But I was such a wretched athlete there was never any chance fantasies of stardom would ever take root. Almost ruthless in my instinctive pragmatism, I focused on the diversion closest at hand: books.

As with all avocations, there was a barrier to entry here, but it was a relatively low one. Neither of my parents were big readers (my dad a bit more; they both read newspapers), or had grown up in households with lots of books. But I did gain an early exposure to libraries—I worked in them all through high school and college—and as cultural commodities go, books are cheap. Among my most prized Christmas gifts were children’s Bibles, which I prized for the stories: Moses, David, Jonah. (Jesus was kinda dramatic, too, I guess.) When I was about ten years old, I received a volume of a children’s encyclopedia of American History in a promotional mailing. It never occurred to me to ask my parents to buy the set. But I learned that one, on the Civil War, inside out. I can still picture the illustrations.

By the time I was in high school—and, I’m embarrassed to say, for a long time afterward—I had acquired a weird smugness. Unlike friends of mine who had multiple talents and opportunities, I was proud of my limitations. I knew what I was about, and it had to do with reading and writing strings of words. There was a self-sufficiency to this passion that could not be matched even by the pickup basketball player, who did not require expensive equipment or expansive fields, but still needed a ball, a court, and some companions. My utter certitude about myself in this regard—in contrast to my looks, my social skills, or other interpersonal attributes—functioned as a form of currency. Looking back, I can see there were people outside my social class who were willing to befriend me (indulge me?) because they were impressed, curious, or simply amused by how resolutely my inner magnet seemed to point my way forward. There’s something clarifying having somebody like that around.

And so, out of some combination of pity, curiosity, calculation, and generosity, I received a better education than centuries of my ancestors ever did. I did my part, small as it was, and rode an imperial wave as it reached its crest. I’ve tried to be dispassionate about understanding how the system I lived in has worked. But make no mistake: I feel a deep sense of love and loyalty to it, however irrational it may be. And while I don’t assume or expect you to share it, I hope I’ve done a reasonably good job of explaining why I think and feel the way I do.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Of course he likes the old order. He’s one of the winners.”  Yes. I will tell you, though, that a lot of the time I don’t feel like a winner—something I say not because I want you to pity me, but rather to illustrate the complexities of aspiration, achievement, and failure as they play out in the American educational system. There are four I want to mention.

The first involves my current status as I understand it. I told you earlier that I knew from an early age what I was about: books. By the time I was ten years old I knew I wanted to be writer. Through a combination chronicled here—parental effort, innate ability, racial inequality, sheer luck—I was able to get a good education, to make a living based on the written word, and to publish a string of tomes. By most reasonable measures, that’s success. Period. Full stop.

One of the more confusing aspects of success, however, is that it can be hard to know if and when you’ve reached your destination. Yes, I’ve written books. Have any of them made me rich or famous? Dispensed with the need for a day job (in my case as a high school teacher—an estimable, if not exactly impressive, profession)? Allowed me to feel I fulfilled the potential I once believed was brimming? No. I take pride in what I’ve accomplished. And I’ve been blessed in any number of other ways—wife, children, friends, creature comforts—without which my life would lack meaning even if my literary endeavors succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I know that in my heart no less than my head. But if a full life should include a sense of something missing, I would point to my incomplete literary ambitions.

If you were to press me as to what would constitute satisfaction, I’ll give you an answer I freely admit is not entirely rational (we don’t get to choose our standards any more than we get to choose our dreams). It’s landing on the New York Times Book Review bestseller list.  As anyone familiar with it knows, the NYTBR, whose weekly ratification of cultural currency I’ve been monitoring for decades, is notorious for its lack of transparency and for any number of cultural biases. It’s not at all hard to imagine benchmarks that are at least as meaningful. “Evergreen” status of steady sales over many years, for instance. Writing a book that becomes the basis of a Hollywood movie. One that flies under the radar as a textbook adoption that influences a generation of students. (I come closest to approaching that standard.) Those could be my most cherished criteria of excellence. But they’re not. Of course, if I had made it to the Times bestseller list, I might have started regretting I never won a Pulitzer or National Book Award. From there, it would be a Nobel. And so on. (Can anyone but Shakespeare be immune from envy? Was he?) I suppose anything is possible, including coming to my senses and having a more logical and satisfying way of assessing my life’s work. I’m not holding my breath. But to live is to hope.

The second point I want to make is that failure—however and whoever is defining it—is rarely complete. In reflecting on an unrealized ambition, it’s always possible, legitimate, and even necessary to say, “No. I didn’t U. But I did get to play in the V league.” Or to say: “I never got to W, but the lessons I learned in the struggle helped me to understand X.” Or: “I know I tried my best to Y. And the knowledge that I tried, that I gave it my best shot, actually makes it easier to move on.” Or: “The cards were stacked against me. The fix was in. And yet, despite that, I was able to Z. I get some satisfaction in knowing that.” In one way or another, our lives almost always involve these kinds of statements. To some degree, they always represent whistling in the dark, rationalizing failure. But they’re rarely only that. Very often it takes a while for such lessons to sink in. They may come to us as gifts later in life, which is why sometimes we actually can feel a little better about ourselves as we age.

The third point I want to make involves my retroactive self-perception: the process through which you are currently reading these words has led me to understand that I’m a lot less smart than I thought I was. This is embarrassing. Like most people, I’d rather be underestimated than overestimated, and it’s a little painful to imagine—painful to know, even if I necessarily lack specific details—there are any number of people who have seen (and do see) my limits much more clearly than I have. But even without such an external perspective, the passage of time has allowed me to understand how quickly an idea or a sensibility gets dated, and it’s a little shocking how quickly that has happened in my own life and work. By this point, standing the test of time seems ridiculously difficult; the most I can hope for is to produce a well-saturated temporal snapshot that captures a passing moment in my life as a tile in the mosaic of the life of my country. Which is what I’m trying to do right here.

But the fourth, and most important, thing is to convey my gratitude for my ignorance. I was so much better off not knowing the limits of my talent, the sheer improbability of my hopes. My disappointing destination seems like a small price to pay for the joy of the journey. (One more disappointment: I’ve veered into the ditch of cliché. Seems fitting, doesn’t it?) Yes: had I been disabused of my illusions, perhaps I might have been able to redirect my ambitions toward more realistic goals—or, better yet, harnessed those ambitions to social reforms that might have allowed for a less severe, more equitable regime than the one that has governed centuries of American life. But a set of circumstances, a life of study, and a fixed temperament have done little to convince me that the devils I know are finally any worse than those I don’t.

Meanwhile, of course, the system, this American Way, got something useful out of me. I did all kinds of things—paid taxes, bought stuff, raised children, practiced a useful trade, performed various community services. There were, moreover, all kinds of things I didn’t do—commit felonies, interfere with government functions, drain budgets. (I’ve been a beneficiary of any number of welfare programs, variously construed, but I think I’ve been at least a break-even proposition from an economic standpoint.) Had any controlling authority bothered to pay any close attention to who I was or what I did, such a person would have reason to conclude that educating me was no net loss.

So that’s what I learned in school. Thank God it took me decades to figure it out. Go figure. And dream on.