ground zero

Granted, Adams's persona was firmly wrapped in the mantle of failure—so much so that savvy readers soon suspected that he was protesting just a bit too much about his ignorance and ineptitude. Still, when he writes that "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts," we can, I think, take Adams at his word. "Inert facts," the material that one dutifully memorizes and then reproduces on exams, were essentially useless because they could not be actively applied to rapidly changing situations. Such "facts" simply sat there, rather like cornflakes in a bowl of milk, and became increasingly soggy. Here it is worth mentioning that Adams's proposed sub-title for the Education was "A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." If the Virgin hearkened us back to a simpler age, one that organized and thus unified itself around the force of religion, science often seemed to dump the human component altogether, preferring the disinterestedness that is an essential component of the scientific method.