Saturday, February 04, 2012

Concepts we need: origin of knowledge

I blogged before about why I know how vaccines work: my mother told me when I was a small child who needed to get a needle, her father told her when she was a small child who needed to get a needle, and he would have learned in university. So what was part of a university education to my grandfather became part of general knowledge to me.

A couple of things I have read recently lead me to think that it's a useful exercise to figure out exactly how and why each of us knows the things we've always known as general knowledge.

First, I read this article about Attawapiskat

I’ve met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees. They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”


My first thought on reading this is "But I have a clue how to insulate housing!" I don't know exactly, but I have a clue - a rough idea, a starting point, some thoughts on how to refine that rough idea.

So why do I know this?

Because my parents' house came with an unfinished basement, and when I was a small child they finished it. And part of the process of finishing the basement was putting in insulation. I haven't yet talked to my parents and traced how they learned to put in insulation, but for the moment we know that I know about insulation because I saw it being done around me, and the people described in the article don't because they've never seen it done around them, which, as the article describes, is the root of many problems in Aboriginal communities.

Then I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the story of the HeLa cell line and Henrietta Lacks, from whom they originated. The book described how Ms. Lacks and her descendents had cultures taken from their bodies and tests conducted without their consent and understanding, and, despite the fact that Ms. Lacks' cells have contributed so much to medical science, her descendents still receive insufficient medical care due to lack of medical insurance (they live in the US). One of the points made in the book is that her descendents don't (and Ms. Lacks didn't) understand the situation very well, and this is portrayed as due to their lack of education.

But this got me wondering: why do understand it? My education didn't cover any of this stuff!

I learned what cells are in grade 9 and/or 10 science class, and that surely contributed to my understanding. But I never took biology, and really learned very little about health stuff in school. So why do I understand it? Part of it is related to my vaccine story above: my parents were able to answer my health questions when I was little, so I've always had the idea that understanding the answers to my health questions is within my grasp. I look stuff up if I don't understand it - and I do understand that I have more resources at my fingertips than the Lacks family did - but ultimately my understanding of the health issues discussed in the books can be traced to the fact that I read newspapers. For probably about 20 years, I've been reading health-related articles that either explain things down to my level of knowledge, or give me the vocabulary to look things up. Sometimes newspaper articles mention interesting-sounding books (like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) which I then read and learn even more about medical stuff, but the original input seems to be newspapers.

I blogged before about how I read newspapers just because we always had them around the house. My parents read newspapers because their parents always had them around the house. I don't know my great-grandparents' precise habits of media consumption, but my grandparents have told me stories that involved them as children looking at newspapers that were around the house. So the origin of my newspaper-reading habit predates living memory.

At this point, some people are probably thinking that these things are a result of how I was parented. But they aren't exactly. The influence did come from my parents, but they weren't doing these things to produce good outcomes for their children. Rather, they were just living their lives with me in the general vicinity. They renovated and read newspapers before they have children, and they continue to do so today with their children grown and moved out.

It's more about the context in which one lives. Fifty-five years before Henrietta Lacks was born, her ancestors were slaves. Fifty-five years before I was born, my grandparents were children, looking at (and not entirely understanding) the newspaper they found lying around their parents' houses. And, because of this, I understand her medical records, while she never even thought to ask.

This is something everyone should think about a lot. It really gives you perspective.

3 comments:

laura k said...

When I worked with inner-city teens, I was amazed (totally floored) by what they didn't know. They were ignorant of basic facts about the world that little kids of middle-class backgrounds take for granted.

The social workers and teachers referred to this as "general knowledge" - how much or how little someone had of it would either help or hurt their life chances. It was such an invisible disadvantage, beyond all the obvious disadvantages of poverty, broken families, crap schools, etc.

impudent strumpet said...

It's also interesting (but far more difficult!) to look at it the other way around: what common knowledge don't you know?

I didn't know what "pull my finger" meant until I was in university. I'd heard the expression on TV or something, but I never witnessed full execution of the "joke".

And I didn't know the precise meaning of passing in the context of driving until a few months ago.

laura k said...

I remember the passing convo! Common knowledge is so culturally based. Moving to Canada put me in a real common-knowledge deficit, which still surfaces from time to time. But being from somewhere else makes it more acceptable.