A word from Ken...
When I was a teenager, I used to pose questions like this: “Mom, can I borrow five bucks for a movie?” Or, “May I get an extension on that term paper?”
When Albert Einstein was a teenager, he asked, “What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light?”
That’s why Einstein rewrote the laws of physics and, thirty years after my school days, his question still leaves me scratching my head.
The point is we all have questions --- admittedly some are more interesting than others. That’s why the Don’t Know Much About series is built around quirky, offbeat and occasionally irreverent questions --- whether it means asking, What did Washington say when he crossed the Delaware? Why did Thomas Jefferson keep slaves? Where was the Garden of Eden? Or Was Jesus really born on Christmas?
These questions are meant to spark the imagination and get people thinking in new ways, examining the easy assumptions we all hold. Underlying the Don’t Know Much About® series is the notion that learning should be a lot more interesting than it was for most of us back in school. Learning works best when we toss out the old way of teaching and bring different ideas together. You can’t understand American History by studying dates and battles, and ignoring geography, literature, or religion. You can’t understand the Bible without a grasp of archeology, history and mythology. And you can’t truly understand or appreciate astronomy and the physics of space without understanding religion, anthropology, and the history of ideas.