I am tempted to claim that education subverts ignorance. But that would imply that ignorance exists on its own, rather than as an lack of understanding. Actually, I’m comfortable with that.

Education subverts ignorance.

Students should always learn how polymorphous ignorance is. When they enter a classroom, they do not cease to confront ignorance; instead they confront a potentially more dangerous ignorance—ignorance coupled with information. A naieve student allows his professor to do what he (consciously or otherwise) would love to do—subvert the student’s understanding of things, and replace it with the professor’s.

Of course this dynamic of subversion is supported by an official ideology of education. Presumably, students come to college to learn, professors to teach. As if certain people were rendered capable of dispensing understanding because they found the means to afford a lot of charmed years behind ivy-covered walls, while others, having been less lengthily sheltered by the ivy-covered aforesaid, were naturally lacking in this transmissible commodity. In other words, an economic model of production and consumption underlies the garden variety classroom.

Personally, I would like to propose a culinary model of education.

In my model, education would be deemed successful, like baking, when done. Altitude, humidity, and the oven would largely determine the precise chronology of “when.” Similarly, in my model the conditions for education to occur would consist in assembling the right ingredients in the same location and heating them up (also stirring occasionally). For this heating up to occur properly, an exchange of energy both more substantial and more reciprocal than that found in most classrooms at present would have to occur. The common classroom would have to involve more information and more interpretation on both sides of the podium. A good class-ending would involve, not the rustle of anxious students preparing to make their escaping by hoisting bookbags to eagerly trembling shoulders, but the parting shots of intellectual combatants torn from their educational battle by the bell.

It may be objected that I present a dream of liberal arts education, leaving aside the requirements of the practical heavy-weights in the hard science departments. But I urge the following distinction in response: there is education, growth in understanding, and there is training, growth in technique. Even the chemistry department should involve (and does, whether it wants to admit it or not) growth in understanding; and even the English department (though some sadly abrogate their duty) should equip its students with the tradition-fashioned techniques to extend or shatter that tradition. Both departments involve concretely instantiated philosophical and moral questions, as well as prejudicial commitments to certain lines of investigation and certain canonical ideas and figures.

These questions, and these prejudices, are the stuff of understanding, and they should never be dispensed according to an economic model. Any intellectual gourmand will taste my point.

Our stomach grumble for the feast of knowledge. Since our cooks fancy themselves businessmen, we go hungry much of the time. But the oven, the classroom with its attendant texts and lectures, stands ready to be lit. And—here is the point I want to make—the knob for turning up the heat lies equally within reach of the student as of the professor. Go ahead and turn it. Subvert the answers. Consider even subverting the questions. Don’t let false roles, theologically maintained for ideological reasons, hinder your educational radicalism. Turn up the heat and pour on the oil.