Life, 1927-06-30 · page 14 of 35
Life — June 30, 1927 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes America's obsession with self-improvement and quick learning. The top cartoon shows a student proudly learning the word "filtrum" (a real anatomical term), illustrating the article's critique: Americans pursue useless knowledge through crossword puzzles and overnight self-education rather than developing genuine understanding. The article argues this "get-smart-quick" mentality produces superficial intellects—people who memorize facts without comprehension. It contrasts this with the old-world value of building character over time. The bottom cartoon, titled "Dawn of the Question-and-Answer Craze," parodies American Revolutionary history as soldiers mindlessly repeat patriotic phrases, suggesting modern Americans similarly absorb information without critical thought. The satire targets American culture's preference for rapid, easy intellectual consumption over substantive learning.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Get-Smart-Quick Americans AS American will lift himself to almost any heights—if it does not take more than fiftecn minutes a day. In the old world a family strives for several generations to lay the foundations of fortune, character, and culture, but here we want to get bigger quick, to get better quick, to get rich quick, and to get smart quick, The pestilential popularity of any pastime which smacks of self-im- provement is proof of my point. Tell Americans a thing is educa- tional and they pile themselves up in suffocating heaps to get at it. One- half of the people who crowd to sce the freaks at the circus do so because they consider it educational. The American clubwoman wants to learn everything about Italian art in an afternoon. Millions took to cross- HURRAH-RAH~RAH! CORNWALLIS GIVES UP AND THE GREAT word puzzles, not because they were looking for innocent amusement, but because they felt crossword puzzles would improve their vocabularies— and without any thought as to what new thoughts they were going to have to express with their enlarged vocabularies. And now we have the plague of questions and answers— another get-smart-quick proposition. Everywhere we go now we mect people with overnight intellects and one-day culture. We see somebody to-day who knows practically noth- ing about anything, and we run into him to-morrow and he knows the name of the real Robinson Crusoe, the author of “The Vision of Piers Plowman,” and the capital of Mon- tana. And somehow he manages to get to tell us these particular three things in the course of a half-hour’s conversation. He didn’t know a one Our History. Chap. VII of them yesterday but he and his friends looked them up last night and they are telling the cockeyed world to-day. It is hard to figure just what will become of America under this new burden of useless and irrelevant information which ques- tions and answers are bringing out, One thing is sure, and that is that the average American is developing an album mind. This, if anything, is worse than no mind at all. What we really need in this country is more cerebration and less remembering. How can we save America from this curse of self-improvement? What can we say to paint the glory of honest ignorance as opposed to the accumulation of impedimentary, fragmentary fact? Are we hope- lessly doomed to become a nation of smattering pops and moms? How can we stem the sale of outlines of everything—from outlines of _his- tology to skimpy skeletons of Seces- sionism? Or where can we go to flee the nouveau well-informed? I don’t care, What we need is a resumption of the old-fashioned feeling that it will be a godsend if only our grand- children begin to show signs of a little intelligence in the family. Don Herold. Rebuilding It FjXCcIFED MOTORIST: It’s — your own fault you were hit. Prostrate Prpestri can't prove that it was. Excited Motorist: Sure I can— we'll go through with the whole thing again. W ELL, one hundred thousand people attended the Kentucky Derby, and it is our expert opinion that the horse is here to stay. Twis BLOODY WAW 1S OVAH! sin DAWN OF THE QUESTION-AND-ANSWER CRAZE, comicbooks.com Ww D Tl B