Heads Full of Answers, Hands Full of Nothing

A quiz can tell you what you know. It cannot tell you what to do with it.

I have been sitting on this porch long enough to watch three generations of Harrow Corners people mistake the map for the road. That quiz running in the paper lately is the freshest example of what I am talking about, and I have got things to say about it.

Now, I do not fault anyone for knowing things. Salt in a pot of stew makes everything taste better, and I will stand behind that until my last good hip gives out. But salt alone is not supper. You can name every hormone in the human body and still not have the good sense to come in out of the rain. You can recite an author's entire catalog, all hundred-and-however-many books, and still let your neighbor's cattle wander through your tomatoes because you could not be bothered to check the fence line.

That is the thing about quiz knowledge. It sits in the head looking pleased with itself. It is decorative. You hang it up like a picture frame with no picture in it, and then you expect people to compliment the carpentry.

Take the hormone question. I will wager good money that half the people who got it right heard it on a talk show somewhere between a mattress advertisement and a segment about whether bread is still fine to eat. They can repeat the answer well enough. Ask them to do something useful with the information and you will watch their expression go soft as overripe peaches. They have got the word. They have not got the salt to go with it.

Old Mr. Thompson understood this particular failure from the inside out. He got it in his head that he could make his fortune breeding a new kind of chicken. Talked about it with the enthusiasm of a man who has never actually cleaned a henhouse. He had done his reading. He knew the genetics, or thought he did. What he did not know was whether the market had room for another egg, or whether his birds would hatch into anything resembling what he had planned. Those chickens did not bring him a fortune. He sold the last of them for less than it had cost him to feed them, and the whole county took note without saying much.

There is a lesson in Mr. Thompson, and it is not that ambition is dangerous. The lesson is that reading about a thing and doing a thing are first cousins at best, and you should not confuse them at the family reunion.

The real questions worth asking are not the ones that puff you up like a parade float. They are the ones that help you get through a Tuesday. How do you keep the chickens laying through a cold snap. How do you handle a neighbor who has been borrowing your goodwill along with your casserole dish. How do you go about your day sensibly when, ever since the lake gave the Hendersons' boy back, certain ordinary things have required a bit more practical management than they used to. That last one does not show up on quizzes, and it ought to, because half of Harrow Corners could use a refresher.

I am not against learning. I raised my children to read and I read myself, right here on this porch with the coffee getting cold because I lost track of time inside a paragraph. But I also taught them that knowing something and doing something are two entirely separate transactions, and the second one is the one that counts at the end of a day. You are not going to be measured by how many answers you got right on a page in some magazine. You are going to be measured by whether the people around you were better off for your having shown up.

Mrs. Henderson knows that lake has a mind of its own, and she does not argue with it. She just works around it, same as the rest of us work around the things in our lives that do not follow the rules we were handed. That is education. That is the kind you cannot get from a quiz, and it does not show up on any score at the bottom of the page.

Knowledge without the wit to apply it is a tree with no roots. Good-looking right up until the first wind.

Mind your salt and your fence line, and leave the trophy case for people with more time than sense. -- Aunt Dot
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