Belief and Knowledge

Between Belief and Knowledge - Charles Kettering Was One of My Great Teachers
By Jerome Gould

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

Charles F. Kettering

I was in charge of the infant monkey nursery, surrounded by rooms full of baby monkeys. There were certain times during my twelve-hour shift when I would have some free time to study, listen to the radio or read. On Sunday night there was a radio show produced at Wayne State University in Detroit and re-broadcast by one of the Boston area college stations that I always checked in with to see what was on. There were only a dozen or so programs in the series and they would repeat them over and over to fill the time slot. Nine of the programs were pretty standard educational fare and I don't remember them at all. The other three changed my life in a fundamental way.

These were actually antique recordings of an address that Kettering had given at some commemoration or dedication ceremony toward the end of his career. He was then one of the few surviving members of a group of entrepreneurs and inventors that changed life for all of humanity in the latter part of the industrial revolution. Here was a man who was responsible for the electric cash register, the diesel locomotive engine, the electric starter for the automobile, safety glass and probably the most profoundly influential of them all, the discovery of Freon gas for refrigeration and air-conditioning. This great technologist spoke mostly not of moving industry and wielding power but of making people's mind grow by paying attention to their hearts.

He told the story of his first professional job as a recent college graduate. He was schoolmaster in a turn-of-the-century one room school house. One of his youngest pupils was a first grader who had already had a difficult experience in school. Although she was obviously bright and could already read at a high level for her age, she could only do it with the book held upside down. Her previous teacher had insisted that she learn to read the "right way" and refused to let her read upside down. Luckily she kept reading and only learned to hate the teacher.