As I sat on the couch in my living room on September 11th 2001, and watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center building, I was struck by a profound sense of wrongness. This sense only continued to grow as I watched in the following days, as Arabs all over the world cheer at the death of three thousand humans. How, I wondered could people be so uneducated as to believe that America was this giant monster that needed to be destroyed? Two years later as I began to work on this essay for my University of Washington English class, I remembered this puzzling feeling. How I wondered once again, could people be so stubborn as to refuse to see the truth behind their beliefs and actions and why when presented even with the facts would people turn away? I remembered then, in Patricia Limerick’s essay “ The Empire of Innocence”, Limerick had claimed “humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy”(417). It seems to me that we (humans) adopt mental realities and are shocked when those preconceived notions don’t conform to reality. Most often, and even more surprising though, we blame “reality”. We seem to do this because the other option of considering the other si

We can not become so afraid of facing reality that we let others dictate to us what we should truly believe, or what the truth is. I can offer no answer on how to avoid this situation, I often find myself afraid to even broach the question, for the truth is often uncomfortable, and it is easier to simply live in the world I have created for myself. Narcissa Whitman’s preconceived notions were so strong, that if she had tried to submit them to a narrow test of accuracy, the truth may have simply been to much, the truth would have forced her to re-evaluate her problems, and finally admit the root of the problem was her, not the Indians. This does not mean that it was okay for her to ignore reality, but because she did, she paid the ultimate price of her life. I can not condemn narcissa though, because I to have faiths that I refuse to evaluate. I can only hope that the price for my beliefs is not as high as her’s .

Education itself can in fact make this situation of people not submitting their thoughts to a narrow test of accuracy worse, not better. Richard Rodriguez, author of the essay “The Achievement of Desire”, in which Rodriguez evaluates his education and its impact on his life says “It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. My brothers and sisters would giggle at our mother’s mispronounced words. They’d correct her gently. My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying not to pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly” (657). Here, Rodriguez’s education is creating a preconceived notion for him, that his parents are not as good as others because they can not speak English as well. If Rodriguez had tested this through a narrow test of accuracy, he would have found that it was a false notion. Another author, Paulo Freire, who wrote “The Banking concept of Education”, includes a passage that demonstrates the difference between an educated man and an uneducated one; “In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by the banking standards was completely ignorant said: “Now I see, without man there is no world.” When the educator responded: “Let’s say for the sake of