What Constitutes General Knowledge?

We have all seen books and articles giving lists of things that we ‘must’ do in order to have a fulfilled life. Some of these are genuinely valuable when they give sensible health and lifestyle advice. However, the worth of some lists is debatable, to say the least. For example, a British newspaper recently gave its readers what it promised were ‘the only ten squash recipes you’ll ever need’. Personally, I think that’s ten recipes too many as I loathe squash. However, are there really people out there for whom it’s a matter of major concern whether they are serving guests squash prepared correctly and not (horror of horrors) a heretical eleventh recipe? And what of lists of essential books that you ‘must’ have read before you die? Is it just me, or does everyone find that they have read a third of the list, tried at some point in their lives to read another third and given up after a few pages, and never heard of the rest?

Lists of this kind are inevitably a matter of personal opinion, and also, it must be said, they are often an excuse for the author to show off. I recall a list of ‘must see’ movies that included several that had never been seen outside film festivals and a couple of art house cinemas. Unless you were a movie critic paid to attend these events (as the author of this particular list was) there wasn’t the remotest chance that Joe/Jo Public could ever have seen the movies in question. The author could thus effortlessly stamp their authority over the readers who were doomed to appear ignorant.

This leads to the following question – who has the right to say what is a worthwhile use of our spare time? Are there indeed viable lists of things that a person should have read or seen or done by the time they are a particular age? Obviously, we want our children to grow up with a reasonable general knowledge, simply so that they can understand what is going on in the world, and adults should maintain this. But this immediately begs the question - what constitutes ‘general knowledge’?

Psychologists have thought they have known the answer to this, because they can produce tests of knowledge. This typically means that when a lot of people take a general knowledge test and their results are plotted on a graph, a bell shaped curve (a.k.a. normal distribution) is produced. Furthermore, performance on the general knowledge test will correlate strongly with the same people’s performance on intelligence tests. Therefore, it is tempting to conclude that it ‘must’ be testing something meaningful. Well, possibly this is true, but it should be borne in mind that the test has been designed to give a normal distribution and correlate well with intelligence tests because when they were choosing the questions to be included in the general knowledge test, the designers deliberately chose questions that would fulfil these requirements. Questions from trial versions of the test that did not give the desired results were excluded. In short, general knowledge is defined as what will give a nice bell shaped curve when enough people are tested.

This is not necessarily always bad. Many tests of general knowledge will give a fair judgement of the skills of people who have been raised in the culture for which the tests are designed. But what if you are not part of this mainstream culture? A key case in point is that many intelligence tests in the past were, either consciously or unwittingly, biased in favour of white middle class people. African Americans in particular often had good reason to feel mistreated because the measures of general knowledge assumed a white middle class upbringing. It’s not that African Americans lacked valuable knowledge, but they lacked the same knowledge set as many White Americans. Thankfully, the worst excesses of this problem are now a thing of a past, though there is still an ongoing debate about how genuinely ‘culture fair’ measures of intelligence are. But bear in mind that nearly all psychological tests are designed for a general population and not for each individual who takes them. Slippage between what the test grades you as and what you actually are is therefore somewhat inevitable.