Insurance against boredom does not get a lot of emphasis as a purpose for education. There is no reason it should, but a lot of our time is spent outside our majors, and smatterings of irrelevant knowledge can add interest to such idle hours.
"Education should open the mind to the enjoyment of new possibilities and variations on one's own beliefs."
The other day, some friends and I saw a Japanese movie whose suggestion that daydreams are the only form of hope puzzled us until somebody pointed out that the movie was made in 1947. This inspired all manner of speculation as to how much hope any Japanese was likely to see so soon after World War II. Could anybody have anticipated the success of MacArthur's imposed reforms? Could military censorship have forbidden more explicit portrayal of Japan's real situation? If so, were elements of the picture symbolic of those problems? Were there buried touches of anti-Americanism?
None of us "knew" the truth about any of this or could claim particular grounds for judgement; but so what? There was nothing at stake, and our smidgen of knowledge enabled lively intellectual exchange and entertaining theory, maybe even expanding our horizons a little. Such meanderings are no more wasting time than walking for exercise with no destination in mind; they beat discussions of sports for content and discussions of politics for peace.
One doesn't need formal education for such chat, but it may open up ideas. My minor in art history never got beyond the renaissance. But it gave me a smattering knowledge of what was linear and what was painterly, and a few concepts of structure and symbolism. My acquaintance with psychology and folklore is even sketchier. But if the magazine in the waiting room is dull or obscure, I can enjoy analyzing the ads — which are, after all, done at great expense for a clearly detectable purpose. I can speculate as to why the cigarette is appropriately represented by a cowboy and why he is never indoors, though the fashion industry's fascination with heroin chic and cadaverous models like Kate Moss is too much for me. I find interest in calculating what percent of the ads contain actual information about the product; to what extent the lack of such information correlates with the ad's expense; how the nature of the product correlates with the approach of the ad; whether the nature of the ad suggests the educational level of the audience.
This is mostly an exercise in ignorance, productive of nothing of value. But a little learning is a dangerous thing only if a person mistakes it for something more, like expertise or Knowledge of Truth. As a matter of fact, even expertise and Knowledge of Truth tend to be temporary things in this time of ever-expanding information: even before the internet, I knew a man who devoted himself to his field and boasted justifiably that his classes were only three months behind the cutting edge. And any cutting edge itself will soon be out of date, for all of us.
Much of the time it makes little difference whether we are making good sense or not, and dibs and dabs of knowledge can be fun. Evolution, for example, is endless fun to speculate on. Clarence Day's This Simian World, a trifling work long out of date, inspires me to wonder what the world would be like if man had developed from various animal strains; Day covers cat worlds and elephant worlds well, but leaves questions in my mind. If our legs had developed like those of frogs, would we be able to ride bicycles? How wide would store aisles have to be? Could lovers cuddle in the front seats of cars?
I think it was Frederick Lewis Allen on automobiles that got me thinking about the unintended effects of technology. How many side effects did the Eisenhower Defense Highways have? Urban Sprawl. Ecological disaster as fields vanished under the concrete. Global warming? Whether our facts are right or not, some important issues arise, some philosophical principles lurk in the background. But mostly it's just entertaining to think about.
Freudian psychology may be falling into disfavor, but it's still a kick to pass time with. Did the old cigarette ads make the same appeal to men as to women when they said the cigarettes — Marlboro, I think — were "so round, so firm, so fully packed"? Perhaps we had better move on.
An old friend of mine used to interrupt this type of social banter by looking up The Facts. He surely felt he was contributing Truth to the conversation, but we weren't looking for Truth; we were entertaining ourselves with ideas. The social unity was more important than Truth, at the moment.
And most important of all, education — formal or otherwise — should open the mind to the enjoyment of new possibilities and variations on one's own beliefs, without exclusive concern with whether they are "right." In a great many situations, it is enough if they are fun.
