Those were the words at the bottom of the six page diagnostic evaluation of my father, some eleven years ago. Sadly, the reason for the evaluation was that my father's cognition had clearly diminished. His short term memory was shot, his long term memory seemed suggestible. The saddest part of the evaluation was the doctor's clear instruction: "No more driving." So it was a difficult day indeed when the evaluation, neatly printed on blue paper, was handed to me. The doctor concluded that much of Daddy's cognitive abilities were gone, but he had been able to get along in that diminished condition for some time, often able to conceal or at least minimize his losses, all because he had a good fund of general knowledge.
Now my father did not have the privilege of a college education. The crash of '29 had put his own father, a telegrapher for the stock exchange, out of work. His mother was killed the following year in a freak accident, and he and his father spent the depression moving from roominghouse to roominghouse on the far north side of Chicago. One single conversation, however, changed his life, and that was when a friend of my grandfather strongly urged him to try to get Dad enrolled in the nearby Catholic high school.
Say what you want, (and there's plenty to say, but not here, please) about the failures of religious education, there were plenty of successes as well. Dad told how he was shocked to go into English class and see everyone diagraming sentences - something he had never seen before. How his German class taught him more about the parts of speech in the English language. How his religion classes gave him an introduction to latin root words, and the stories about the human condition illustrated by the various books of the bible. How math and drafting led to an appreciation of engineering. And oh, how he loved music, and his chance to sing in glee club.
And so it was, that he developed a life-long love of learning, reading everything he could get his hands on. And after the war, where he served in the Army Air Corps teaching young flyers to use the radios that he installed and maintained in their aircraft, he adapted those electronics skills to work for the Bell. (In those days, young'uns, it was just the Bell, and there was only one.) And eventually, he met my mother, who worked in the engineering department.
Now here's where their path varied from the template of the times: Mom had been to college. In fact, Mom had won a scholarship to a small college in Kansas, and because my grandfather was a railroad worker, she could travel back and forth for free. At the time, sending her away was cheaper than keeping her home, so she had the good fortune to earn a B.A. at a time most women her age simply aspired to an MRS. In fact, she was a dual major - math and english, and was the class valedictorian.
Now today we think nothing of a woman earning a degree - in fact we take it for granted. But at that time, it was a privilege even for men and quite out of the ordinary for women. So a marriage in which the wife was considerably better educated than the husband was not a common thing. But I think that part of what made it work was that they both loved learning. The house was full of books - a full set of Dickens, the World Book, the novels of Graham Greene, a host of submarine novels, (even before The Hunt for Red October) and of course the family bible, and periodicals - the National Geographic (sent as a gift each year by a schoolteacher aunt), Scientific American, Popular Science, Arizona Highways (another wonderful gift) Time, the Daily News (back when editorials were inside page one, and the last page of the first section was the best of the day's photos), and more. And at the end of the day, it was a common thing to find Mom and Dad sitting side by side in the living room, reading. So even though Dad lacked Mom's education, they always had something to talk about.
I began to consider this recently, when working with young interns at work and studying with them at school (Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.) The thing I can't help but notice is that many of them have particular skills, but no particular ability to think. That is, they seem to lack the ability to analogize from one type of problem solving to another. For example, I recently heard someone liken the process by which the body walls off the tuberculosis bacilli to Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado." Not a great medical explanation by any means, but the liberal arts grads in my age cohort understood immediately, while those more junior, whose educations had been far more specialized early on, looked blankly on. They had never been exposed to Poe, and for the most part had very little background in literature at all. I've seen lawyers tell the judge they "don't want to cut the baby in two," a reference which, absent some knowledge of bible stories, is meaningless.
Well here's the thing, as I see it: I can take a kid who can think, and I can teach her a skill; but I can't take every kid with a skill and teach her to think. So my question tonight to you is: What are those things which belong in a good fund of general knowledge?