Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [50]
Many people take it for granted that the teachers in their local schools are adequately trained in the subjects they teach, have carefully and fairly worked out their grading systems, and have painstakingly developed meaningful lessons. They may also assume that the school's administrators are aware of what is happening in the various classrooms, have developed precise methods of evaluating faculty performance, and are applying those methods to identify the most and least effective performances. Others, of course, assume exactly the opposite.
Most people hold similar assumptions about other areas of endeavor: about medicine, law, and other professions, about industry, about small and large businesses, about the numerous organizations found in society. And their general assumptions usually govern their particular ones. The person who assumes that all doctors are quacks will be inclined to assume that the particular doctors she visits is also a quack.
Which of those assumptions are warranted? Those for which the person ahs sufficient experience that supports that assumption better than any other one. What is "sufficient" depends on the situation; the more general and sweeping the assumption, the more experience would be needed. Unfortunately, it is very easy to take too much for granted, to assume something with little or no experience or for which the experience leads equally well to an entirely different view.
POPULAR UNWARRANTED ASSUMPTIONS
Many viewers of the Dracula movies assume the main character was purely a fiction. They do so casually, with little or no warrant. The assumption is unwarranted, for there could easily have been a real-life villain that the horrible movie Dracula was patterned after. In fact, there was one. His name was Vlad Tepes, nicknamed "Draculya." Tepes was a fifteenth-century Rumanian nobleman who ruled so cruelly that peasants of the time regarded him as a human vampire. Though he never bit people's necks and drank their blood, he once invited the poor and sick people of his domain to a large feast and then set fire to the banquet hall. Another time a Turkish ambassador and his party nailed to their heads. Certainly his most horrible deed was to have the heads of twenty thousand of his victims cut off and mounted on stakes for display.1
For decades many Americans assumed that China was a medically backward country. The basis of their assumption was little more than the more general assumption that the Chinese were socially backward. Because China was closed to Westerners, no substantial evidence was obtainable to support any assumption about Chinese medicine. So no assumption was warranted. (Since the early 1970s, when visitors were permitted in China, reports have suggested not only that their health care is quite advanced but that in general it is better for he average person than what is available in the Untied States.)2
Similarly, the traditional assumption of white and black America about American Indian medicine men has been that they are charlatans, dispensing superstition that certainly can't help anyone who is really sick. This assumption is not based on any knowledge but merely on a generally derogatory view of the American Indian. Only in the past decade or two have many people begun to learn the value of the medicine man's treatment. The National institute of Mental Health, for example, established a scholarship program to help Navajo Indians study "curing ceremonials" under tribal medicine men. One of the supporters of this program, psychiatrist Robert