Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring

Natural History, Sept, 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould

Most famous quotations are fabricated; after all, who can concoct a high witticism at a moment of maximal stress in battle or just before death. A military commander will surely mutter a mundane "Oh hell, here they come" rather than the inspirational "Don't one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes." Similarly, we know many great literary lines by a standard misquotation rather than accurate citation. Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam," and Jesus did not proclaim that "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." Ironically, for this special issue on learning, the most famous of all quotations bungles the line and substitutes "knowledge" for the original. So let us restore our celebratory word to Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian

spring;

There shallow draughts intoxicate the

brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

I have a theory about the persistence of the standard misquote, " a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," a conjecture that I can support through the embarrassment of personal testimony. I think that writers resist a fun and accurate citation because they do not know the meaning of the crucial second line. What the dickens is a "Pierian spring," and how can you explain the quotation if you don't know? So you extract the first line alone from false memory, and "learning" disappears.

To begin this little essay about learning in science, I vowed to find out about the Pierian spring so I could dare to quote this couplet that I have never cited for fear that someone would ask. And the answer turned out to be joyfully accessible -- a two-minute exercise involving one false lead in the encyclopedia (reading two irrelevant articles about artists named Piero), followed by a good turn to the Oxford English Dictionary. Pieria, this venerable source tells us, is "a district in northern Thessaly, the reputed home of the muses." And Pierian therefore becomes "an epithet of the muses; hence allusively in reference to poetry and learning."

So I started musing about learning. Doesn't my little story illustrate a general case: we are afraid because we fear that something we want to learn will be hard and that we will never even figure out how to find out. And then, when we actually try, it's easy -- with such joy in discovery, for there can be no greater delight than finding the definitive solution to a little puzzle. Easy, that is, so long as we have the tools at hand (not everyone has immediate access to the Oxford English Dictionary; more sadly, most people never learned how to use this great compendium or know that it even exists). Learning can be easy because the human mind is an intellectual sponge of astonishing porosity and voracious appetite, that is, if proper education and encouragement keep those spaces open.

A commonplace of our culture, and the complaint of teachers, holds that, of all subjects, science ranks as the most difficult to learn and therefore the scariest and least accessible of all disciplines. Science may be central to our practical lives, but its content remains mysterious to nearly all Americans, who must therefore take its benefits on faith turn on your car or computer and pray that the thing will work) or fear its alien powers and intrusions (will my clone steal my individuality? will greenhouse warning drown my city?). We suspect that public knowledge of science may be extraordinarily shadow, both because few people have any interest or familiarity with the subject (largely through fear or from assumptions of utter incompetence) and because those who profess concern have too superficial an understanding. Therefore, to continue with Pope's topsy-turvy metaphor, Americans shun the deep drink that sobriety requires and maintain dangerously little learning about science.

I write to argue that this common, almost mantralike, belief among educators is entirely wrong and primarily the product of a common error in the sciences of natural history (including human sociology in this case) -- a false taxonomy. I believe that science is wonderfully accessible, that most people show a strong interest, and that levels of general learning stand quite high (within an admittedly anti-intellectual culture overall), but that we have mistakenly failed to include the domains of maximal public learning within the scope of science. (And, like Pope, I do distinguish learning, or visceral understanding by long effort and experience, from mere knowledge, which can be mechanically copied from a book.)

I do not, of course, hold that most people have the highly technical skills that lead to professional competence. But such is the case for any subject or craft, even in the least arcane and mathematical of the humanities. Few Americans can play the violin in a symphony orchestra, but nearly all of us can learn to appreciate tile music in a seriously intellectual way. Few can read ancient Greek or medieval Italian, but all can learn to love a new translation of Homer or Dante. Similarly, few can do the mathematics of particle physics, but all can understand the basic issues behind deep questions about the ultimate nature of things and even learn the difference between a charmed quark and the newly discovered top quark.