why didn't Paul Revere just use his cell phone instead of being so mean to that poor horsie?

Favorite rants around here include having to deal with people who think history began with their graduation and spending money on goods of dubious quality from foreign parts. I'm shocked to realize that I've been judging imports from China based solely on what's been happening with Chinese craftsmanship during a few recent years in my lifetime. Quite obviously these are the people who invented silk, in many beautiful colors and textures, whose porcelain and pottery can still stir the heart and whose paintings can lift your sight to heaven. China has a long, long history, much longer than ours, and I can only hope that this brief era of ghastly attempts at world domination through cheap ugly fashion will be a short one.

This is where I explain that my high school had a great turnover of teachers between the time that I graduated and the time my sister entered. Mine were the last of a generation of ancients - I'd like to think they were aged by wartime and economic disasters, but I'm sure my classmates and I had a role. The best of them were cynical and world-weary. Miss A was an Army brat who'd lived in France. She taught its civilization as well as its grammar. She spent her summers taking groups of rambunctious teens on bicycle tours long after the age when she should have been on a bike, but it was the only way she could afford to travel. Mr R's dreams of medical school had been interrupted by an unplanned family, but he taught biology with verve, imparting a sense of wonder every time he helped me focus a microscope. Miss H was a gentle lost soul who read sonnets aloud, ignoring spitballs, paper planes and flying chalk. "I am in this building to expose them to poetry," I heard her say to a colleague. "Even if some of them are only here for the lunch, they are entitled to poetry and that is what I will give them." Mrs S - well, I'm sure her dying words were either about the Bourbons, who learned nothing, remembered nothing, or more generally, about those who do not remember history being doomed to repeat it. Whatever the course she was assigned, those were the principles she taught. And of course there were horrors - the gasp that greeted me when I entered Mr Meredith's calculus class and sat down. He went to his grave believing that the female brain's capacity for mathematics stopped at long division, and I'm still looking for that grave so I can dance on it.

My sister's teachers were world-changers, in their own heads anyway, not that much older than their students, hopeful, cheerful, knowing war from books and media, knowing that they were building a future by molding young minds. They aspired to level playing fields. They were young, optimistic, arrogant. I was the one who told her how to cut school to get to a museum exhibit before it moved on, who snuck her into foreign films, who pushed her to think outside the classroom. Efforts well spent, now she pushes me.

OK, now back to me. I learned from teachers and family that there were people who made it from infancy to adulthood without having seen a television. I learned that for hundreds, even thousands of years, people had no books in their houses. And most had no houses, and books were rare because there was no printing. I learned that scientists suffered because their theories and discoveries disturbed comfortable thinking. I learned that most of the time, people will believe what they're comfortable believing.

If, for example, you believe that your file room is staffed by skilled, dedicated professionals who pay close attention to their work and never lose a folder or a document, you can sign your firm's professional insurance application in good conscience. You don't want to hear from some malcontent with a stamped receipt in her hand that important papers have gone missing. If you believe that your product is beneficial and healthful, you don't have any qualms about shading the description of the strange rashes that afflicted some nervous weirdos after consuming it. If you believe that you have great taste and a fine fashion sense, then it's not a reach to believe that you are doing a good deed by bringing cheap ugly ill-made clothing to the market, notwithstanding Gresham's Law - oh, right, your education was limited to fashion and your high school history course was, um, basic, so the concept that Bad money drives out good also means that crap merchandise drives out good is beyond you....

If you believe that you are an open-minded, clear thinking, good person, you may not notice when your limited experiences lead you to sound like a fool.

Recently someone who (I thought) should have known better, haughtily advised me that Joan of Arc was a legend and never existed in real life.

Um, who was burned at the stake in Rouen by the English in 1431?

Genius insisted there was no contemporary documentary evidence. Like photos.

I began to explain about chroniclers at royal courts and chroniclers who accompanied armies, and stopped. There's no cure for stupid.

Even the teachers whose names I still bless had their failures, and for all I know, they may have thought I was one of such. (But please see change of heart described in opening paragraph. What life has taught me: you can always learn something.)