In
his May 3, 2017 column in The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html conservative commentator
George Will wrote a sentence that I can’t get out of my head. Will is trying to
pinpoint what he sees as the “disability” that makes Donald Trump unfit to be
president. “[T]he problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he
does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing
is that he does not know what it is to know something.” I’m not typically in
agreement with George Will, but his insight here is, I think,
stunning—diagnostically astute but also exceedingly relevant to those of us in
education.
Knowing
what it is to know something is a key concern in epistemology, that branch of
philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and methods of analyzing
knowledge. Epistemology can get pretty heady, and, to be honest, I quickly find
myself in the weeds when I try to read deeply in it. But the general concerns
of epistemology are central to education and, for that fact, to many human
pursuits, to the professions and trades, for example. Good electricians as well
as good surgeons acquire a body of knowledge and use it flexibly in different
situations with different features. This flexibility requires an awareness of
what one knows, what to do when one doesn’t know something, and when experience
in the field might require a revision of what one knows. When surgeons or
electricians display a lack of such awareness, we consider them incompetent—and
possibly dangerous.
These
observations apply to both teachers and their students, from the primary grades
to the graduate seminar. If an education involves more than the most mechanical
rote learning, then by definition it involves consideration of what we’re
learning, how we’re learning it, and how to assess what we’ve learned. A good
education helps us be more deliberate thinkers and think about our thinking.
And
so I come back to George Will’s observation about Donald Trump not knowing what
it is to know something, and how that quality marks Mr. Trump as unqualified to
be president.
Along
with abundant evidence of Mr. Trump’s ethical transgressions, we have daily
proof of his disregard for the truth—and his moral laxity and dismissal of fact
interact to his advantage. We also have continual display of his ignorance and
intellectual carelessness—his confusion about U.S. history, for example. But if
you want an extended illustration of the muddled state of what he does know and
the related defects in his thinking, read the long interview he recently gave
to The Economist. http://www.economist.com/Trumptranscript
The interview is on Mr. Trump’s economic policy, a topic that one would assume is his strongest suit, given his continual self-advertisement as a
business wizard. The editors note that the interview was “lightly edited,”
though I bet the editors had to do more than light editing to make the
interview readable. Still, the interview reads in many places like a word salad
of policy fragments and clips of economics-talk blended with Mr. Trump’s
trademark non-sequitors, meandering sentences, and evasions.
The
Economist is a pro-business, pro-market publication which in theory would
make it sympathetic to Trump’s economic policies, though the editors would
differ with him on trade. But in separate articles, the editors blast the
incoherence and shallowness of the thinking behind “Trumponomics.”
“Trumponomics… is not an economic doctrine at all. It is best seen as a set of
proposals put together by businessmen courtiers for their king…. The economic
assumptions implicit in it are internally inconsistent. And they are based on a
picture of America’s economy that is decades out of date.”
Donald
Trump is a master pitchman with a keen sense of how to exploit (and, lately,
undermine) the media. As I wrote in my blog of November 30, 2016, http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2016/11/donald-trump-celebrity-culture-and.html,
he has managed through his tenure on The Apprentice and other
self-promotions to create the persona of the ultra-successful and all-powerful
businessman, and he sold that image to a lot of voters who were desperate for
the economic transfiguration he promised. But as Pitchman moved to President,
the celebrity illusions of omniscience and transformative power dispelled like
smoke rings, and we are left with a bundle of emotional pathologies and the
intellectual limitations George Will describes so well.
A
lot of us in education have denounced Donald Trump for his appointment of the
supremely unqualified Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education and for the
policies the two of them champion. But there is another reason we educators,
regardless of political affiliation, should be deeply concerned about Mr.
Trump’s occupation of the White House: his continually evident lack of
knowledge and the significant defects in his thinking—and his nonchalance about
both.
Mr.
Trump’s supporters use a language of education to defend the neophyte
president’s performance: He’s learning on the job, they say, or he’s a good
listener. Yet we have little evidence that he’s actually thinking through what
he’s hearing versus simply reacting to it. Nor do we have evidence that he’s
learning very much at all, as demonstrated by the recent incident involving the
sharing of classified information with his Russian visitors.
People
critical of President Trump say that his fragmented and digressive language is
strategic, is used to distract us and keep us off balance. This may well be
true, but what Mr. Trump says can be strategically evasive and still reveal the
liabilities in thinking that concern me here.
Many
of us have spent our professional lives helping students of all ages think more
deliberately and carefully. Learning new things and checking what you know is
central to this work as is developing strategies to find something out when you
don’t know it. To have all this violated daily is an affront to education—a
statement by example that the fundamental processes of learning and knowing do
not matter.
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