I had time to kill in between errands at the local mall a few days ago, so I picked up a book called The Looming Tower and sat down to read the first few pages. The book, by Lawrence Wright, is subtitled "Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," and from the opening paragraphs I could see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. I'm only on page 77 now, but I've already gained enough new information about history, geography, religion, engineering, and the workings of the American criminal-justice system to more than justify the price of the book and the time it takes to read it.

On page 67, Wright offers this bit of insight into Islamic radicalism. It comes from a sociologist at the American University in Cairo, who knew one of the early leaders of al-Qaeda and spoke to him shortly after the man had been released from an Egyptian prison, where he and thousands of other Islamists had been brutally tortured during years of detention:

These early adapters to Islamic radicalism weren't illiterate bumpkins; according to the sociologist, they were the cream of the Egyptian educational system, intelligent and ambitious young men who gravitated toward science and engineering. When they moved from smaller cities to Cairo to pursue their education, they typically joined militant Islamist societies for the sense of brotherhood and community.

After 9/11, a lot of Americans found ourselves asking an unfathomable question: How does someone get to a point at which flying airplanes into buildings and causing mass death and destruction actually makes sense? I'm sure it's more complex than, "Their leaders were tortured in Egyptian prisons," but that's clearly a piece of the puzzle.

The take-away message: Torture doesn't end when the victim leaves prison. It changes a person, as torture victim and current presidential candidate John McCain noted in this Newsweek essay two years ago:

Forget that McCain apparently changed his mind yesterday when he voted against a bill to ban waterboarding; he had it right the first time.

Unfortunately, the modern political system requires ignorance on the part of our leaders. In some cases, profound ignorance is regarded as an attribute. Consider Mike Huckabee. He's charming and personable and has a genuine talent for retail politics, but he doesn't believe in evolution.

When Bill Maher asked him explicitly about the earth being 6,000 years old, he said he didn't know. Worse, he said that nobody knows. I'll concede that nobody knows the answers to lots of spiritual and theological questions, but we understand perfectly well that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. As a writer once observed, that's 1,000 years after the Sumerians invented glue.

Evolution is among the most basic principles of modern science. You can't have any of the biological sciences without it. More to the point of this blog, you can't really understand exercise and nutrition unless you acknowledge that early primates evolved into modern humans as a way of adapting to changing environment conditions. Really, we can't know much about our world if we dismiss all the science that explains what it is and how we got here.

So when a major presidential candidate -- a guy who's often talked about as a running mate for McCain -- tells Maher, "None of us are running to be an eighth-grade science teacher," we should ask ourselves this: Do we really want a national leader who isn't qualified to teach eighth-grade science?

On C-SPAN the other day, I happened to catch a lecture by physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was speaking about the problems that result when people take militant stands against science. You can look through his PowerPoint slides here. One slide in particular nails the problem in just three bullet points:

• 53 percent of American adults don't understand that the last dinosaur died before the first human lived
• just 50 percent of adults understand that the earth revolves around the sun, and takes a year to do it
• 47 percent of adults don't know that modern humans evolved from other species of animals

This is how Jacoby defines the problem in America today:

A friend of mine in grad school, a former high school teacher, described this attitude as "militant ignorance," and it's what drove him out of teaching at that level. (He currently teaches writing at a community college.)

Attitudes aside, I notice that the educational system itself seems to have moved beyond knowledge. They teach kids to read, and from what I've seen they do it very well. They teach math and science, and I think they do that pretty well, too, despite my problems with the volume of homework they give kids, and the relentless emphasis on teaching to the test.

What they don't do, to my continued surprised, is teach kids things that are worth knowing. There's no civics at all. I'd be shocked if any of my kids or their friends could tell you the difference between a city, county, and state. The geography is puzzlingly abstract. Kids learn that "agriculture" is an important industry in the Deep South, but how is that meaningful information? Do kids even understand what agriculture is? Do they understand that different crops grow better in different parts of the country?

My daughters learn more about history and geography from their American Girl books than they do in the classroom. There's nothing wrong with learning from recreational reading -- I do it every day -- but it seems to me that formal education could be a lot more interesting than it is.

I mean, if you wanted to raise a generation of citizens who dismiss the value of knowledge, and in many cases disdain the very facts upon which knowledge is based, isn't this exactly how you'd do it?  

Which brings me to the title of this post: Movie buffs will instantly recognize "Knowledge Is Good" as the motto of fictional Faber College, the setting of Animal House. One of the funniest lines in Animal House comes when John Belushi's character, Bluto Blutarsky, tries to rally his defeated frat brothers to fight back against the system:

When I saw it, back in 1978, the audience howled at the "Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" line.

Today? Once again, here's Susan Jacoby, explaining the incident that prompted her to write a book about American ignorance. It happened in New York City on September 11, 2001. She'd gone into a bar to get a drink to calm her nerves:

At least Blutarsky knew which war he was talking about.