To start an intellectual fire, rub two facts together.

This may seem reasonable, maybe even clever. Perhaps nothing more.

You have to be familiar with contemporary public schools to understand how profound the answer is. Permit me to explain.

Modern, progressive education (i.e., what we are doing every day to the country’s children ) is fundamentally a war against facts, against knowledge, against information, against truth. You would never guess that an Education Establishment would adopt such a strategy. But ours did, years ago.

We can imagine some ed professors at Harvard chortling: “Yeah, that's how we dumb down the whole society, we just take away all the knowledge. Then we rule.”

“OMG. It's so tempting when you put it like that.”

In time, rubbing two facts together will be impossible. There won't be any facts left. That's the joke.

The situation is much worse than you may suppose. Many college students don't know the simplest stuff, such as who won the Civil War. A professor at Notre Dame famously lamented that his students are “know nothings.”

Going back 100 years, there has been a steady, relentless vendetta against facts and knowing facts. If you don't memorize something, in what sense do you know it? But the policy is official: no names, no dates, no poetry, no multiplication tables, no facts permanently inscribed in your brain.

So what will the children learn instead of knowledge and facts? They will learn the politically correct feelings and opinions that the ideologues in charge want them to know. No facts allowed in this mix.

Personally I think this is perfect recipe for a weak, irresolute society. And also for bad writing.

Yes, there are literary implication when we talk about facts. I've long been in love with the word specificity. It is often the magic ingredient in good poetry and prose. I've often written in the margin: More specificity.

Consider this fairly ordinary sentence: The skinny man ran across the asphalt street and climbed over a cinderblock wall.

It's wonderfully specific. You see that asphalt. Those cinderblocks. A thin man running.  Conrad said that the writer’s main job “is to make you see it.” You do that most easily when you use lots of facts.

So we see that it's not just intellectual fires, it's fires in general. Intellectual, literary, and political. Rub facts together.

Typically, soft words, vague words, abstract words, these are all dead on arrival. The brain wants hard words, precise words, concrete words, words that convey lots of information.

Decades ago I wrote an essay titled “In Praise of Stark Lucidity.” Some professor complained that the word stark is unnecessary. So’s your old man. “In Praise of Lucidity” is classy, quite good enough for the average intellectual journal, but nothing special. Stark lucidity, however, is high-voltage. You can tell that the writer is ready to fight over this. In truth, I remember vacillating. Finally, I decided, some extra excitement is better than no extra excitement. I still enjoy savoring the title.

QED: My message is to other writers. Keep an eye on the public schools. You'll see they're waging war against everything you care about.

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Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet,

and education reformer. His most recent book is “Saving K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?"

See "The Crusade Against Knowledge":

http://www.improve-education.org/id70.html